DRUG ‘RAP’ AT COURT
Opioid makers’ song & dance
A pharmaceutical company accused of racketeering made an in-house rap video that featured A$AP Rocky beats and a rhyming bottle of highly addictive narcotics spray.
The jury in the Boston federal court trial of Insys Therapeutics founder John Kapoor viewed the five-minute video featuring company executive Alec Burlakoff dressed as a prescription bottle of Subsys on Wednesday.
“You think you’re bad well I’m the baddest / I was created in a lab with the land of the cactus,” Burlakoff, the vice president of marketing, raps over the beat for A$AP Rocky’s “Fu--in’ Problems.”
The music video, titled “Great by Choice,” highlights the benefits of pushing doctors to prescribe the pain medication.
The chorus of the song praises “titration,” a process to quickly increase Subsys dosages.
“I love titration. Yeah, it’s not a problem. I got new patients and I got a lot of ‘em,” the cast raps. “VIP service like they’ve never seen . . . Got more docs than Janelle’s got selfies.”
Burlakoff’s mascot costume is labeled with the drug’s maximum dosage — 1,600 micrograms.
Some jurors seemed entertained and one juror could be seen nodding her head to the rhythm as the video played, Bloomberg reported.
Insys Therapeutics founder Kapoor, 75, and other company execs are accused of bribing doctors across the country to increase their prescriptions of Subsys — a fentanyl spray known to have caused one overdose death.
The trial has also featured bombshell testimony that Insys hired an ex-stripper as a sales manager, who even gave a doctor a lap dance.
Meanwhile, in Manhattan federal court, one of the doctors who was al- legedly bribed by Insys took a plea deal for accepting kickbacks to prescribe the powerful painkiller to his patients.
Alexandru Burducea, 41, was one of five doctors charged for accepting bribes totaling over $800,000 from Insys. The doctors were allegedly paid to be “speakers” at hundreds of sham education presentations that often turned into wild drugand booze-fueled parties.
Burducea pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy and faces up to five years in prison at his May 22 sentencing, though he is likely to get less time under federal sentencing guidelines.