The founder of an Arizona pharmaceutical company has been sentenced to 5 1/2 years in prison for his role in a bribery and kickback scheme that prosecutors said helped fuel the opioid crisis.
John Kapoor, the 76-year-old former chairman of Insys Therapeutics, was sentenced Thursday in federal court in Boston.
Kapoor and others were accused of paying millions of dollars in bribes to doctors across the nation to prescribe the company’s highly addictive fentanyl spray, known as Subsys.
The case is considered the first that sought to hold an opioid maker criminally liable for the drug crisis, which has claimed nearly 400,000 lives over the last two decades.
