Hard Sell, Evan Hughes

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.