Opioid ties eyed in Rx scam trial
300 prospective jurors under review
Prosecutors plan to explore opioid abuse when they screen jurors for the racketeering trial of five former pharmaceutical executives accused of bribing health care providers to push a potent fentanyl oral spray for cancer sufferers on patients who didn’t have cancer.
The lawyers and U.S. District Court Judge Allison D. Burroughs were still hashing out Wednesday the final questionnaire to be distributed today to 300 prospective jurors. A suggested draft submitted by U.S. Attorney Andrew E. Lelling’s office proposed asking jurors whether they, a family member or close friend has had “any negative experiences with the use of prescription opioids or opioid dependency.”
Eighteen jurors will be seated for the 14-week trial — six of them alternates. Burroughs indicated she will tell them at some point during the process that while their parking will be reimbursed, their $50 per diem will be deferred for the duration of the government shutdown.
John Kapoor, the 75-yearold billionaire founder of Arizona-based Insys Therapeutics, and his white-collar top dogs Michael Gurry, Sunrise Lee, Richard Simon and Joseph Rowan are charged with racketeering and fraud in connection with the alleged nationwide scheme to drive up demand for their controversial pain medication Subsys in a market saturated with competition.
Last year, months after his 2017 arrest, Forbes listed Kapoor’s net worth at $1.8 billion. Onetime Insys CEO Michael Babich and former vice president of sales Alec Burlakoff — colleagues who’ve already pleaded guilty and are set to be sentenced in May — top the feds’ list of 144 potential witnesses. Testimony is expected to begin Jan. 28. In addition to prescribers, prosecutors plan to put patients on the stand.
“It’s primarily to prove the fraud,” assistant U.S. Attorney Fred Wyshak told Bur- roughs at a final housekeeping hearing Wednesday the defendants did not attend. “It’s primarily to show they were using other medication that was working and were switched to Subsys by doctors who were being bribed, and the effects were calamitous to them. They couldn’t function, they would sleep all day. … There was withdrawal.”
Kapoor’s attorney Beth Wilkinson argued Subsys is not unique in this way. “They are all predicted as side effects of this type of drug. What does that go to?” she asked.
Subsys, a fentanyl spray administered under the tongue, was manufactured by Insys to ease episodes of unbearable pain in cancer sufferers. The defendants are accused of bribing doctors and nurses across the country with pharmacy track records of high rapidonset opioid prescription rates to prescribe Subsys to patients who didn’t need it, while directing Insys employees to pose as health care providers in order to misrepresent patient diagnoses and treatment histories to insurance companies.
The bribes and kickbacks were in the form of fees for talking up Subsys at speaking engagements and Insys paying the salaries of practitioners’ office support staff, prosecutors said.