Pain Hustlers

Soon to be a major motion Netflix film starring Emily BluntPreviously published as The Hard Sell‘This is that rare story of the opioid crisis in which the bad guys face a genuine reckoning. I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough. A tour de force.’ Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of PainIn the early 2000s, John Kapoor had already amassed a small fortune in pharmaceuticals when he founded Insys Therapeutics. A boom time for painkillers, he had developed a novel formulation of fentanyl, the most potent opioid on the market.Kapoor, a brilliant scientist with relentless business instincts, was eager to make the most of his innovation. But there was a problem: the drug was a niche product, approved only for cancer patients in dire condition. So he recruited an ambitious, persuasive team, who employed a variety of deceptive techniques, from zeroing in on suspect doctors, to falsifying patient records to deceiving insurance companies. Insys became a Wall Street sensation.That is, until 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 opioids.With colourful characters and true suspense, Pain Hustlers lays bare the pharma playbook. Evan Hughes offers a bracing look not just at Insys, but at how opioids are sold at the point they first enter the national bloodstream – in the doctor’s office.

'This is that rare story of the opioid crisis in which the bad guys face a genuine reckoning. I couldn't turn the pages fast enough. A tour de force.', 'A fast-paced and maddening account . . . What’s most surprising and powerful about The Hard Sell is not one company’s criminality . . . as much as how institutionalized these practices were across the modern drug industry.', A pacey crime caper set against the backdrop of the opioid crisis . . . When I tell you that reading “The Hard Sell” is like watching a Scorsese film, you will assume I am exaggerating. Pick it up and tell me I’m wrong, Vivid . . . [An] insightful account of how a company that went public in the most successful IPO of 2013 soon ended up a poster child for corporate greed, Does the world really need another book about the opioid crisis? . . . The Hard Sell by Evan Hughes proves a worthy addition to the collection.

Evan Hughes was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Reporting in 2015. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, GQ, New York, Wired, and The New York Review of Books. He is the author of Literary Brooklyn.

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