
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


How a drug company made millions pushing an opioid painkiller up to 100x stronger than morphine, as many on Wall Street looked the other way. FRONTLINE filmmaker Tom Jennings and Financial Times reporter Hannah Kuchler discuss their new investigation of Insys Therapeutics — from a jaw-dropping interview with a former sales director who admits to bribing doctors to prescribe the highly addictive drug Subsys, to how Wall Street propelled Insys’ success even as questions emerged about its practices, to what role drug companies’ pursuit of profits hasplayed in the opioid crisis: “I think that it's really interesting just how people are able to disconnect their actions from the consequences, especially in business,” Kuchler says.
With federal prosecutors using laws designed to catch mob bosses, Insys would ultimately become the first pharmaceutical company to have its top executives sentenced to prison time in connection with the opioid epidemic. For more on Insys’ spectacular rise and fall — and its consequences — watch the documentary Opioids, Inc. from FRONTLINE and the FT, and read our in-depth joint reporting — also available at ft.com/insys.
Correction: An earlier version of this description misstated the strength of Insys’s painkiller.
By GBH4.5
10531,053 ratings
How a drug company made millions pushing an opioid painkiller up to 100x stronger than morphine, as many on Wall Street looked the other way. FRONTLINE filmmaker Tom Jennings and Financial Times reporter Hannah Kuchler discuss their new investigation of Insys Therapeutics — from a jaw-dropping interview with a former sales director who admits to bribing doctors to prescribe the highly addictive drug Subsys, to how Wall Street propelled Insys’ success even as questions emerged about its practices, to what role drug companies’ pursuit of profits hasplayed in the opioid crisis: “I think that it's really interesting just how people are able to disconnect their actions from the consequences, especially in business,” Kuchler says.
With federal prosecutors using laws designed to catch mob bosses, Insys would ultimately become the first pharmaceutical company to have its top executives sentenced to prison time in connection with the opioid epidemic. For more on Insys’ spectacular rise and fall — and its consequences — watch the documentary Opioids, Inc. from FRONTLINE and the FT, and read our in-depth joint reporting — also available at ft.com/insys.
Correction: An earlier version of this description misstated the strength of Insys’s painkiller.

91,086 Listeners

38,472 Listeners

6,689 Listeners

25,882 Listeners

9,178 Listeners

1,332 Listeners

8,291 Listeners
58 Listeners

11,914 Listeners

1,181 Listeners

2,335 Listeners
13 Listeners
34 Listeners

246 Listeners
13 Listeners

112,351 Listeners

2,307 Listeners

23,926 Listeners

76 Listeners

5,426 Listeners

16,225 Listeners

16,152 Listeners