On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Janet Bond Arterton in Hartford, Connecticut, at a hearing held via videoconference, sentenced a former Insys Therapeutics Inc. sales manager to three years of probation for his role in paying doctors kickbacks for opioid prescriptions.
The former sales manager for Insys managed sales representatives in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. The prosecutors claimed that the manager received inflated quarterly bonuses for engaging in a kickback scheme related to subscriptions for Subsys and were seeking a substantial prison term.
Subsys, a fentanyl-based spray, was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in January 2012 for cancer patients. Fentanyl is an opioid used as a pain medication and is about 100 times more powerful and addictive than morphine. The prosecutors noted that the doctors are required to enroll in an FDA program and complete training programs to prescribe it.
The former employee avoided jail term and is sentenced to probation for assisting the company's business practice of conducting misleading educational events that helped funnel money to health care providers for prescribing its drug Subsys.
Judge Arterton noted that the former employee was given the period of probation because he had taken responsibility for his actions, cooperated with prosecutors, and had overcome his struggle with opioid addiction.
Opioids are on the market for ages and have been used basically for pain relief for post-surgical pain, cancer-related pain, chronic or persistent pain. Opioids when used in proper dosage and along with a combination of other pain treatments, work in relieving pain successfully, unless there is a misuse or abuse of the drug.
Companies manufacturing opioids convinced the medical community that these medications were not addictive and were purely beneficial. This belief raised the number of prescriptions and sales unwarrantedly, resulting in a mass misuse of these drugs, to the extent that this was identified by the FDA as a public issue and named it an opioid crisis.
