The former district manager at Insys Therapeutics was irate. Several doctors were not prescribing enough of the company’s Subsys painkiller, which contains fentanyl, a powerful and addictive opioid.
So the manager, Jonathan Roper, wrote his sales team a pointed email, saying that “we invest a lot of time, money, blood, sweat, and tears on ‘our guys,’ ” — a reference to doctors who were paid to speak to other physicians about the medicine. “We hire only the best of the best to be a part of our speaker bureau and dropping script counts is what we get in return? This is a slap in the face to all of you and is a good indication as to why NONE of you are climbing in the rankings this quarter.”
Last Thursday, Roper and a former Insys sales rep named Fernando Serrano were arrested and charged with violating federal kickback laws. They allegedly ran a scheme between October 2013 and June 2015 in which doctors were paid thousands of dollars to participate in “sham educational programs” designed to boost Subsys prescriptions, according to Preet Bharara, the federal attorney for New York. The email from Roper two years ago was part of the indictment.
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