A well-told story of opioid crimes by a company often overshadowed Purdue Pharma.
A journalist pulls back the curtain on the scandals that sent the first pharmaceutical executives to prison for their role in the opioid crisis.
Insys Therapeutics had the best-performing IPO of 2013 when the scrappy Arizona-based drug company took its stock public. But behind its investor-pleasing gains lay years of crimes involving the illegal promotion of its opioid painkiller Subsys, a liquid-spray form of fentanyl. Hughes gives a brisk and engaging account of the sales-obsessed culture fostered by Insys founder John Kapoor, which led a group of whistleblowers to file qui tam lawsuits. The illegal acts included creating sham speaker programs that paid kickbacks to doctors who prescribed Subsys and setting up a fake “reimbursement center,” where Insys workers lied to insurers to get them to pay for prescriptions. Some employees and prescribers later pleaded guilty and cooperated with government investigators; Kapoor and four other Insys executives were convicted at a trial on racketeering and other charges. The company also agreed to pay a $225 million settlement, but Hughes says that because Insys declared bankruptcy, victimized patients will see little cash: “The most that patients will get is a refund for their co-pays.” The author avoids an in-depth analysis of how Insys’ misconduct resembled that of the Sackler family’s more notorious Purdue Pharma, but implicit in his book are at least two answers for those who wonder why Kapoor went to prison and no Sacklers did: The privately held Purdue faced less scrutiny than the publicly traded Insys and from the start hired world-class lawyers, while Insys lacked even an in-house legal counsel until a government subpoena arrived. Some readers may wish that Hughes had compared the companies more directly and brought such issues into sharper focus, but he adds a valuable chapter to recent opioid chronicles such as Ryan Hampton’s Unsettled and Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain.
A well-told story of opioid crimes by a company often overshadowed Purdue Pharma.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-385-54490-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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