Evan Hughes

The blistering inside story of a startup that made millions pushing opioids--until its cutthroat tactics were exposed and its executives put behind bars John Kapoor had amassed a small fortune in pharmaceuticals when he conceived of a new product. It was the 2000s, and opioids were big business. If Kapoor, an immigrant and the billionaire founder of Insys, could find a new way to administer the highly potent fentanyl, he could patent his invention and sell it to those in need--at a steep price. The only problem: There weren't enough people in need. Kapoor's drug was approved for breakthrough cancer pain. If Subsys was going to turn a profit, the company would need to persuade doctors to prescribe it "off-label," for other, lesser forms of pain. This is the story of how Insys turned a niche drug into big business. With executives leading the charge, Insys sales reps seduced doctors with charm, money, and sex. Its administrators lied to health care providers, claiming recipients had cancer when they did not. It pushed drugs onto patients that would have benefited from safer options, or no drugs at all. The strategy worked: When Insys went public, it notched the biggest IPO of its year. But several employees reached their limit and quietly blew the whistle, bringing the full force of the justice system upon the drug maker. In The Hard Sell, author and National Magazine Award-finalist Evan Hughes lays bare the pharma playbook. He shows how drug makers like Insys, fueled by greed and a hunger for market share, turn deception into profit. The book represents a stunning vindication, but also a cautionary tale. As Hughes shows, Insys didn't do anything its competitors weren't also doing. It was simply worse at covering its tracks.

Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup

The Hard Sell

Soon to be the Netflix film Pain Hustlers starring Emily Blunt ‘A pacey crime caper set against the backdrop of the opioid crisis . . . When I tell you that reading The Hard Sell is like watching a Scorsese film, you will assume I am exaggerating. Pick it up and tell me I’m wrong.' - Patrick Radden Keefe, The New York Times In the early 2000s, John Kapoor had already amassed a small fortune in pharmaceuticals when he founded Insys Therapeutics. A boom time for painkillers, he had developed a novel formulation of fentanyl, the most potent opioid on the market. Kapoor, a brilliant scientist with relentless business instincts, was eager to make the most of his innovation. But there was a problem: the drug was approved only for cancer patients in dire condition. So he recruited an avaricious team, who employed a variety of deceptive techniques, from falsifying patient records to deceiving insurance companies. Insys became a Wall Street sensation. That is, until insiders reached their breaking point and blew the whistle, sparking a sprawling investigation in the government’s fight to hold the drug industry accountable in the spread of addictive opioids. With colourful characters and true suspense, The Hard Sell lays bare the pharma playbook. Evan Hughes offers a bracing look not just at Insys, but at how opioids are sold at the point they first enter the national bloodstream – in the doctor’s office . . .

The inside story of a band of entrepreneurial upstarts who made millions selling painkillers—until their scheme unraveled, putting them at the center of a landmark criminal trial. "A feat of rigorous sleuthing and deft storytelling that unfolds with the velocity and verve of a Scorsese film... A tour de force." —Patrick Radden Keefe John Kapoor had already amassed a small fortune in pharmaceuticals when he founded Insys Therapeutics. It was the early 2000s, a boom time for painkillers, and he developed a novel formulation of fentanyl, the most potent opioid on the market. Kapoor, a brilliant immigrant scientist with relentless business instincts, was eager to make the most of his innovation. He gathered around him an ambitious group of young lieutenants. His head of sales—an unstable and unmanageable leader, but a genius of persuasion—built a team willing to pull every lever to close a sale, going so far as to recruit an exotic dancer ready to scrape her way up. They zeroed in on the eccentric and suspect doctors receptive to their methods. Employees at headquarters did their part by deceiving insurance companies. The drug was a niche product, approved only for cancer patients in dire condition, but the company’s leadership pushed it more widely, and together they turned Insys into a Wall Street sensation. But several insiders reached their breaking point and blew the whistle. They sparked a sprawling investigation that would lead to a dramatic courtroom battle, breaking new ground in the government’s fight to hold the drug industry accountable in the spread of addictive opioids. In The Hard Sell, National Magazine Award–finalist Evan Hughes lays bare the pharma playbook. He draws on unprecedented access to insiders of the Insys saga, from top executives to foot soldiers, from the patients and staff of far-flung clinics to the Boston investigators who treated the case as a drug-trafficking conspiracy, flipping cooperators and closing in on the key players. With colorful characters and true suspense, The Hard Sell offers a bracing look not just at Insys, but at how opioids are sold at the point they first enter the national bloodstream—in the doctor’s office.

For the first time, here is Brooklyn's story through the eyes of its greatest storytellers. Like Paris in the twenties or postwar Greenwich Village, Brooklyn today is experiencing an extraordinary cultural boom. In recent years, writers of all stripes—from Jhumpa Lahiri, Jennifer Egan, and Colson Whitehead to Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer—have flocked to its patchwork of distinctive neighborhoods. But as literary critic and journalist Evan Hughes reveals, the rich literary life now flourishing in Brooklyn is part of a larger, fascinating history. With a dynamic mix of literary biography and urban history, Hughes takes us on a tour of Brooklyn past and present and reveals that hiding in Walt Whitman's Fort Greene Park, Hart Crane's Brooklyn Bridge, the raw Williamsburg of Henry Miller's youth, Truman Capote's famed house on Willow Street, and the contested streets of Jonathan Lethem's Boerum Hill is the story of more than a century of life in America's cities. Literary Brooklyn is a prismatic investigation into a rich literary inheritance, but most of all it's a deep look into the beloved borough, a place as diverse and captivating as the people who walk its streets and write its stories.

Evan Hughes

About

Books

Join the club