Siobhan
Trusted Member
This story is so sordid, I couldn't find the words to express a proper write up.
More at the link:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/witness-drug-company-hired-ex-stripper-to-increase-sales
Thanks to @ghosttruck for this article!
BOSTON – A former exotic dancer was hired as a regional sales manager at a drug company despite her lack of pharmaceutical experience because executives believed she could help carry out the company's plan to bribe doctors into prescribing its powerful painkiller, a former executive told jurors on Friday.
Alec Burlakoff, onetime vice president of sales at Insys Therapeutics Inc., said he met Sunrise Lee at the strip club where she worked and recruited her because he thought she would have the "ability and the willingness and the desire to talk to physicians and speak with them about the quid pro quo."
The judge has prohibited attorneys on both sides of the case from talking to the media.
Burlakoff is one of the government's key witnesses in the trial against Insys founder John Kapoor , Lee and three other former executives of the Chandler, Arizona-based company. They are accused of scheming to pay doctors bribes in the form of fees for sham speaking events in exchange for prescriptions of Subsys, a fentanyl spray meant for cancer patients with severe pain.
A former employee told jurors in January that she watched Lee give a lap dance at a Chicago nightclub to a doctor that the company was pushing to prescribe the drug.
Last month, jurors watched a rap video made to encourage employees to talk doctors into prescribing higher doses of the drug. In the video, sales representatives danced around a giant bottle of the highly addictive fentanyl spray and rapped about titration, the process of increasing the strength of a patient's prescription until it reaches the adequate level.
At the end of the video, it's revealed that Burlakoff was wearing the fentanyl spray costume.
Burlakoff told jurors Friday that Insys employees were clear with physicians about their expectations for prescriptions in exchange for speaker fees. A doctor who didn't have any ethical problems with it and agreed to the deal was called a "whale," he said.
More at the link:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/witness-drug-company-hired-ex-stripper-to-increase-sales
Thanks to @ghosttruck for this article!