U.S. prosecutors won an important battle against big pharma in what is hopefully a watershed event Thursday.
Billionaire John Kapoor founded InSys Therapeutics in 1990, and subsequently went on to make money off of selling drugs like fentanyl to physicians. Kapoor did not, however, follow proper business practices along the way and eventually started bribing physicians to overprescribe his company’s drugs and contribute to the opioid crisis that was recently declared as cause for emergency by President Donald Trump.
Kapoor and other defendants have been charged with fraud and racketeering, and several states are suing InSys on grounds of shady marketing practices.
Jonah Baker | Argonaut
InSys is only one of a wide variety of pharmaceutical companies that have taken advantage of the public for personal gain. This particular case is particularly egregious because it put lives at risk during a time in which opioid addictions are rising at an alarming rate.
For years, pharmaseutical companies have been hotbeds for shady business practices and consumer exploitation.
Martin Shkreli, former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, once raised the price of a drug from $13.50 to $750 per pill while it can be found for as little as 10 cents in other parts of the world, according to a September 2015 New York Times article.
Blood-testing startup Theranos raised more than $400 million by claiming that their technology would be able to revolutionize and personalize the blood testing and drug delivery systems of the modern day. But, the company was eventually exposed for having close to none of their promised technology.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Carreyrou dug deep to find that Theranos and then-CEO Elizabeth Holmes effectively lied to investors and potential business partners, but no charges have been brought forth against the company yet, according to the magazine Wired.
These are only the companies that have been caught or accused of taking advantage of the public with damning evidence. It seems like every miracle breakthrough made by a pharmaceutical or biotech company is paralleled by another story of fraudulent activity or mistreated patients.
The federal government must do a better job of keeping these entities in check. The charges leveled against Kapoor and others at InSys are a step in the right direction, but there is so much more that needs to be done for consumers and investors to work on a level playing field with pharmaceutical companies.
In 2015, the Public Affairs Council conducted a nationwide survey, gauging the public opinion of regulation in various industries. The survey found 46 percent of the public believes pharmaceutical companies are under-regulated. That figure was the highest of any industry in the survey. The health insurance companies that play a big part in widening access to opioids and other drugs are also under public scrutiny, with 36 percent of those surveyed indicating they believe health insurance providers are not regulated enough.
People like Kapoor, Shkreli and Holmes receive an abundance of negative press that keep pushing the dark side of pharmaceuticals into the spotlight. Each former CEO is responsible for decisions that put hundreds of lives in danger, and there are dozens of other big pharma companies continuously putting lives at risk for their own personal gain.
The federal justice system is just beginning to investigate the shady business practices that proliferate throughout the pharmaceutical industry. We may never truly know just how much those same companies are responsible for the opioid epidemic, but there must be increased scrutiny on these firms from the public and the government.
There are state-filed lawsuits against big pharma companies in at least five different states, citing possible misleading advertising and understatement of drug effects that lead to dangerous addictions. That number of lawsuits is only going to grow as more and more dirt on pharmaceutical companies is uncovered.
If the federal government wishes to protect the public and determine to what extent big pharma is responsible for the opioid epidemic, they must further their efforts to reprimand the disreputable companies prevalent in the industry and reevaluate how to regulate the industry as a whole.
Jonah Baker can be reached at [email protected]