U.S. drug company founder charged with bribing doctors to prescribe addictive opioids

This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 73%. (I'm a bot)

The founder of U.S. drug company Insys Therapeutics has been charged with leading a nationwide conspiracy to bribe doctors and pharmacists to widely prescribe an opioid cancer pain drug for people who didn't need it.

John N. Kapoor was charged along with group of his colleagues on Thursday with pushing prescriptions for the highly addictive drug.

Kapoor, 74, of Phoenix, was listed by Forbes several years ago as having a worth of $2.4 billion US. That worth has fallen amid the indictments of numerous fellow Insys executives, but Forbes still listed Kapoor's worth at $1.75 billion US on Thursday as he went to U.S. federal court in the fraud and racketeering case.

The case naming Kapoor follows indictments against the company's former CEO and other executives and managers on allegations that they provided kickbacks to doctors to prescribe a potent opioid spray called Subsys amid a drug epidemic that is claiming thousands of lives each year.

In Massachusetts, former Insys CEO Michael L. Babich and five other former executives and managers are set to go to trial in October 2018 and have pleaded not guilty.

A spokesman for Insys said this week that the company is under new management and has replaced nearly all its original sales staff.

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