Families hoping for justice in prescription trial

BOSTON — Drug company executives weren’t satisfied with sales for their powerful painkiller, so they devised a plan, prosecutors say: Offer cash to doctors in exchange for prescriptions. Soon, the highly addictive fentanyl spray was flourishing, and executives were raking in millions.

Now, the company’s wealthy founder is heading to trial in a case that’s putting a spotlight on the federal government’s efforts to go after those it says are responsible for fueling the deadly drug crisis.

“It really is a day of reckoning,” said Richard Hollawell, an attorney for the parents of a New Jersey woman who died of an overdose in 2016 after she was prescribed Subsys, a drug meant for cancer patients with severe pain.

John Kapoor, the wealthy founder and former chairman of Chandler, Ariz.-based Insys Therapeutics Inc., is the highest-ranking pharmaceutical company figure to face trial amid the opioid epidemic that’s claiming thousands of lives every year.

The 75-year-old, who resigned from the company’s board of directors after his arrest, and the four other former Insys employees being tried alongside him are charged with racketeering conspiracy. Kapoor has said he committed no crimes and believes he will be vindicated at trial, which begins Monday in Boston’s federal court.

But two of his top lieutenants, including the company’s former chief executive, are now cooperating with prosecutors and are expected to tell jurors that Kapoor directed the scheme to boost profits. Sarah Fuller was being treated for fibromyalgia and back pain when an Insys sales representative and her doctor met with her at her doctor’s New Jersey office to persuade her to begin taking Subsys, according to a lawsuit her parents filed against Insys, Kapoor and others.

In an order to get Fuller approved for the drug, an Insys employee duped the pharmacy benefit manager into believing that the employee worked for the doctor’s office and that Fuller was suffering from cancer pain, the lawsuit says.

Fuller died of an overdose a little over a year later at age 32.

Julio Cortez / Associated Press Barbara Fuller, left, holds a sweatshirt honoring her late sister, Sarah Fuller, as their mother Deborah Fuller, right, looks on from their porch in West Berlin, N.J. The trial of the Insys Therapeutics Inc. founder John Kapoor, who is accused of scheming to bribe doctors into prescribing a powerful painkiller, is putting a spotlight on the nation’s opioid crisis.