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Doubleday

Hard Sell: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup

Regular price $28.95 USD
Regular price Sale price $28.95 USD
Title: Hard Sell: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup
ISBN: 9780385544900
Publisher: Doubleday
Published:
Binding: Regular Hardback
Language: English
Condition: New
New from the publisher

Non-Fiction 1377091

Publisher Description:
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 fast-paced and maddening account.... Until I read The Hard Sell, about the outrageous behavior of an obscure drug company, I hadn't appreciated the full extent of the filth or the dark stain the opioid sector has left on the entire industry.... What's most surprising and powerful about The Hard Sell is not one company's criminality--we've grown inured to corporations behaving badly--as much as how institutionalized these practices were across the modern drug industry." --New York Times Book Review

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 opio