The Hard Sell: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup, Hardcover

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 delighted by his innovation and eager to make the most of it. He gathered around him an ambitious group of young lieutenants looking to share in his success. His hungry 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 scale the corporate hierarchy and 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.

In The Hard Sell, National Magazine Award-finalist Evan Hughes lays bare the pharma playbook. He draws on unprecedented access to insiders of the Insys saga, from top executives to foot soldiers, from the patients and staff of far-flung clinics to the Boston investigators who treated the case as a drug-trafficking conspiracy, flipping cooperators and closing in on the key players.

With colorful characters and true suspense, The Hard Sell pries open a window onto the pharmaceutical industry at large. 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.

About author(s):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.