The wild tale that inspired the Netflix film

Although the film’s sequence of events seems strange, the Pain hunters the true story is equally bizarre and difficult to believe. Directed by David Yates (Situation), Pain Traffickers is a fictional retelling of the 2016 Insys Scandal, when extortion accusations were made against the company and several employees. Emily Blunt stars as Liza Drake, a single mother hired to find doctors to bribe them into prescribing a specific painkiller to their patients, which helped the company make incredible profits.

Blunt plays Liza, a single mother who works as an exotic dancer to make ends meet when Peter Brenner (Chris Evans) offers her a lucrative job at the pharmaceutical company Zanna. In addition to Blunt and Evans, Pain Traffickers has an all-star castincluding Catherine O’Hara, Andy Garcia, Jay Duplass and Brian d’Arcy James. However, although the film’s story was close to the real-life incidents of the Insys Scandal, several differences set the two apart.

What really happened in the Insys scandal

Pharmaceutical company paid doctors to incorrectly prescribe the drug

Node Pain dealers True story, John Kapoor was the man who oversaw the criminal conspiracy to bribe doctors to sell highly addictive and deadly opioids to patients who didn’t need them. Jack Neel (Andy Garcia) is based on Insys’ John Kapoor in the film. During the time when thousands of Americans died from opioid overdoses, Kapoor became one of the richest people in America, named by Forbes magazine among the 400 richest people in America (via AARP).

In the true story, Kapoor hired Alec Burlakoff in 2012. According to court testimony, Kapoor said Insys had a problem because its new drug, Subsys, was a fast-acting painkiller approved only by the FDS for specific purposes – helping patients. with cancer. who had already tried other painkillers and saw no relief. He wanted doctors to prescribe it to more people. He felt the drug should be more profitable. Burlakoff said any doctor could prescribe it for “off-label” purposes for any treatment.

“We knew that if we could get a patient to take the medicine, over time it would become a bigger source of revenue. The longer the patient took the medication, the higher the dose they would use and the more revenue this would be worth to us.” -Michale Babich

There was already a program in which pharmaceutical professionals paid doctors to teach their peers the benefits of a medicine. Instead of doing this, Insys paid doctors to prescribe Subsys for any ailment. The company hired representatives to visit doctors and offer them money to prescribe the drugs, and the ball started rolling. Soon, people were dying in droves due to addiction to dangerous drugs.

In the Insys salesperson program, some received more than $400,000 a year in bonuses when they searched for doctors and had patients prescribed medications at higher prices. Doctors most likely to compromise ethics for money were considered “whales” and often wrote up to $30,000 a month in prescriptions per patient. When Insys paid a doctor $100,000, they expected a profit of $200,000 from that doctor.

In August 2013, Insys sales representative Maria Guzman filed a whistleblower lawsuit, making the wrongdoings public. Despite this, the company continued its shares and in 2015, Kapoor was worth US$3.3 billion. In 2016, six Insys executives were indicted on federal RICO conspiracy charges, and in 2017, Kapoor resigned. In 2019, Kapoor and his co-defendants were found guilty and Insys filed for bankruptcy. In 2020, the guilty players were sentenced to prison.

Everything that is known about Drug Subsys

The drug was misrepresented by Insys

Subsys is a strong painkiller prescribed for cancer patients who already take other opioid painkillers around the clock for their pain. It’s only approved by the FDA for patients whose bodies have become “tolerant” to their other medications and need more help (via NIH.GOV). Subsys was a sublingual spray of fentanyl, a powerful but highly addictive opioid painkiller (HHS-OIG).

Warnings indicate that it should only be used together with other non-fentanyl narcotic pain relievers used 24 hours a day. It should also not be used for any purpose other than cancer-related pain (via Drugs.com). It remains highly addictive and side effects can slow and stop breathing when not taken in appropriate dosages. According to AARP, more than 8,100 people have died while taking Subsys.

How was the film different from the book?

The characters in the film were all fictional or composite

THE Pain Traffickers the film was based on the non-fiction novel by Evan Hughes, The Hard Sell: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startupbased on an article called Pain Traffickers. This was one of several books about the opioid crisis in the United States, which also includes Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Empire of Pain (about the Sackler family), Doped by Beth Macy (who got her own Hulu miniseries) and two books by Sam Quinones – Dreamland and The Least of Us – that dealt with people affected by the opioid crisis.

There were several important differences between the film and the Pain dealers true story. The film is based on the book, which tells the true story but takes creative liberties with the story and characters involved. None of the characters in the film have the same names as those involved in the case. In several cases, the film’s characters are based on more than one person involved in the scandal. The main character, Liza Drake, is a composite character based on different people.

“This is not the detailed story of Insys. It’s inspired by that – the fringes of this industry and how they exploit a very marginal sector of the healthcare industry and make a fortune from it.” -David Yates (electronic warfare).

The original article contained a line claiming a “former exotic dancer“Worked for Insys. That line is probably why the film created the character Liza as a single mother and exotic dancer who took the job to help with her medical bills, thanks to her epileptic daughter. Speaking of daughter Phoebe, she was a completely fictional addition to the film’s story As for Liza’s actions, Maria Guzman (the real-life whistleblower) and Sunrise Lee are the main people who inspired the character.

The film also changed the location of the scandal, moving it strictly to Florida. In real life, the scam took place across the country, throughout the United States. It was much bigger and more widespread than the film made it seem. The film not only changed the characters involved, but also renamed the company to Zanna, presumably to protect the filmmakers from any unforeseen consequences of using the company’s real name. THE drug was also renamed to Lonafin.

Where are all the real-life people today?

Prison sentences have been completed

In 2020, a Federal judge sentenced John Kapoor to five and a half years in prison for her role in the Insys Scandal (via AARP). “This was an offense of greed,” U.S. District Court Judge Allison D. Burroughs said before sentencing. Another Insys executive, former vice president of sales Alec Burlakoff, received 26 months in prison. Burlakoff became a government witness and testified against the company. The judge also sentenced several other actors in the scandal to prison terms.​​​

However, Kapoor only served two years of his sentence. He was released in 2023 and ordered to repay $6 million in legal fees (via Reuters). Insys paid for its criminal defense attorneys as required by its statute. A bankruptcy judge ruled he had to pay it back because he was not entitled to defense for any “knowingly fraudulent or deliberately dishonest” misconduct. Alec Burlakoff received a 26-month sentence and joined the White collar advice team to help others facing white crime charges.

Maria Guzman, the whistleblower, was named 2019 Whistleblower of the Year by Taxpayers Against Fraud (via Phillips and Cohen). According to her LinkedIn page, she has worked for another pharmaceutical company since 2011, as she is a senior sales representative at Pfizer. It seems that everyone involved in the Pain dealers‘ scandal have already left prison or have moved on with their lives.