Drug company used rap video to push for higher doses, sales

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Employees at a drug company accused of bribing doctors rapped and danced around a giant bottle of a highly addictive fentanyl spray in a 2015 video meant to motivate sales reps into getting patients on higher doses.

 

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Given that that most drugs of abuse (cocaine, cannabis, nicotine) are more addictive inhaled, how did FDA come to the conclusion that inhaled fentanyl's a good idea?

Buscusriot This offends me.

WCIA3Mark Don't knock fentanyl. It's used for people with end stage cancer.

And what’s wrong with that...?

Wow. This may not be a great look for big pharma.

...Of course I'm not the only one seeing this in the photo, right? RIGHT?!?!

We need REGULATION

moatsad2071

realDonaldTrump Miller You failed to state the OpoidEpidemic was created by of BigPharm 👄

So Kapoor is on trial, but the Sacklers aren't?

Peak HumansOfLate

So - like that Ajit Pai rap about gutting net neutrality.

The profit motive can lead to positive outcomes in many industries. The pharmaceutical industry is not one of them.

Fucking lol America

Just think of how successful Don Chapo could have been if he'd advertised

Jmacliberty Blood money.

This is disturbing and funny at the same time. it reminds me of this,

This is Disgusting and proves people who sell this stuff are the most amoral pieces of garbage on the planet.

'White-collar crime' was coined for those folks. Sales reps: you have no excuse.

What a sentence

Kno Together with physician we assess the best pain med depending on diagnosis, usually fentanyl is prescribed for severe skin cancer with broad lesions or malformations or short term big vasculitis or, mix dg wounds

Kno marketing a pre anaesthetic and cancer drug..disgusting ! they should be fined !! fentanyl is a difficult drug to proportion for other pain/diagnosis without risks of addiction. And Marketing ceo was the fentanyl bottle shit..

elegantcoretta Hate the game.

DemSocialists What the fuck?

TheMercedezXXX First they try using Rap to make everything sound cool & hip. Now they use dubstep to sound cool & lit... I hate these commercials...

AmyAyers16 Why are they trying to turn business into a bad acid trip?!

kenjaques No words.............

DemSocialists And nothing will happen to the amoral corporatists. Actually I take that back... they may get appointed by a US president to be in his administration one day!

DemSocialists Thought this was an onion article.

hayBEARS I'd like to see my Paxil 'get jiggy with it'

DemSocialists HumansOfLate

LateStageCapitalism at its finest

TheMercedezXXX TheOnion how are you going to top this?

Legalize drugs.

Wow . . . this is the last kind of publicity legitimate drug firms (assuming any exist) need. Don't know of any law that requires idiots . . . to display their idiocy so flamboyantly.

TheLoveBel0w Damn it, I hate it when they do that. Got me wanting to see video so I click link, no video.

?

Cc BathtubsOverBwy

It looks like Shkreli loaned them his Wu Tang record and they got overly excited. Must’ve been the beats... or the poppers.

Ah, so that’s why they couldn’t afford to expand R&D that year.

And don't forget 'pot is bad'. Big pharma is a joke.

'Babich told jurors that Insys looked for sales reps who were “poor, hungry and driven” or what they called “PHDs.” Insys also recruited employees who were “easy on the eyes,” Babich told jurors.'

Omg

You can’t make this stuff up

The top 2 prescribing doctor's went to jail over this drug. And the big pharma assholes probably got a bonus.

Holy fuck

1999: A rapping lion tells you not to do drugs. 2019: A rapping fentanyl spray tell you to do MORE drugs.

It's totally a coincidence that big pharma flooded the market with highly addictive opioids and then cut everyone off at the same time an unprecedented amount of heroin was flooding our streets. Totally a coincidence. Shut your eyes. Go to sleep.

Media creators: Quick! How do we make this look cool- look 👀 *hip hop*? Also media creators: baseball caps! Baseball caps BACKWARDS and baggy jackets! That’s what they’re doin right now right?

PhilDavis_CG

Wow

Teressa_Raiford Out of touch. They should visit communities ravaged by opioids.

This is shocking! Of wait sorry I had it backwards this is sadly unsurprising.

Motivated by *Greed*🚬☕😈

But cannabis is the worst am I right?

crall79

gawdz0rz 😑 AndreaWoo

FFS! What 😂😂😂 ShitYouCantMakeUp

This is the same as the aggressive marketing of oxycontin. Can this not be regulated? There are already laws on truth in advertising and fraud, right? Death penalty for dealers not needed. Prosecute with the law that already exists. Clean up: FDA, APA, AMA - big pharma influence.

What 🧢

i particularly enjoy the slickly-produced minute-long ads during big sports telecasts for chemo drugs that are used to treat one very specific form of lung cancer that is definitely a great use of money

Looks like an anal lube bottle. Also highly addictive. To dems 💥!!

ajlamesa Roses are red Bounced back is the eagle What kind of psychopaths Made all this shit legal

Its weird, Making videos about meds. 🤔 Is this the lead up to putting heroin back in Bayer aspirin? t.v. commercials, that only talk about side effects of meds, like death, growing a 3rd arm, etc... Isnt quite exciting? What's happening right now!?😬

🤦🏼‍♂️

That is just pure evil.

BUILD THAT WALL! 🙄

Wtf

Disgusting. David. Forever 21. Fentanyl.

iheartguitar 😮

I really hate reality

The Open Payments (pharma to physician) data hasn't been updated since 2017. While this company may no longer give executive lap dances, other pharma companies might. ps related, what's the reported lap💃🏽value? CMSGov LastWeekTonight AynRandPaulRyan

They were in fact acting as drug dealers & pushers

This is what happens when you privatize pharmaceuticals and make our healthcare system dependent on it.

Capitalism makes me sick

Sad times.

LastWeekTonight

BootsRiley

This is the root of the opioid crisis.

alizardx Very nice.

Sounds like the same playbook that cigarette manufacturers used to get people hoped. The greed is what drives them. And we pay the price. 😖

Capitalsim had nothing to do with this.

It should be criminal, but of course it isn't.

I've got to hear it though.

That's 4 years ago, right? Not excusing them I think drug companies are heartless greedy crooks but AP couldn't find anything more current?

Rethinking my stance on the death penalty after hearing their songs.

Sorry to bother you is a documentary

My husband died from fentanyl

😡

🤢

When will companies learn that rap videos are never the answer

We would be well served by kicking the pedestal out from under physicians. Their status (and pay) is usually not commensurate with their skill, knowledge, or ethics. Don't get me wrong. There are good, smart docs, but many aren't all that good.

Hell world

Parody is dead

There is no such thing as satire that's too 'on the nose' anymore

Here's one reason for our Opiod Epidemic that should be a real National Emergency! FAKENationalEmergency

These mofos are worse than ElChapo but it's ok! It's legal and they have lobbyists.

Fahrenthold THIS is the national emergency.

Completely disgusting. They are basically celebrating people’s deaths/overdoses.

Using rap to promote drugs?

The only ones that get hurt are the cancer patients No one else should be getting it prescribed

TheLoveBel0w So if the lack of a border wall is the cause of fentanyl addiction, that means the illegal mexican immigrants are taking our high paying pharmaceutical marketing jobs now. Is nothing sacred?

3L3V3NTH So because of $$ these people ruined the lives of people who actually need pain medicine to survive daily. They corrupted the bad Drs and gave them kick backs N bonuses to prescribed what big pharma wanted at the time.

Nice. Classy.

Stories like this just confirm the odd feeling I had when watching Sorry to Bother You -- that it's not comedy or sci-fi, it's a documentary with an ultimately optimistic outlook. I'll have to watch it again to know for sure.

We already knew that drugs were cool, though

A drug dealer is a drug dealer even if they wear a white lab coat or a $5000 suit. Lock them up and throw the key away. When did making money start to outweigh the patient's safety.

YoniFreedhoff Nice

This is whst happens whe. McConnel_leads we have a government that doesnt protect CenturetheSenate

BootsRiley They have killed so many people. Some of them were my friends.

If that isn’t an argument for socialism, I don’t know what is and I’m not even a socialist.

BootsRiley OFFS....

BootsRiley

BootsRiley But the southern border!!!

yeshelloevan Thats Crazy Smh

Album sales up or down?

I found a video of the rap:

BootsRiley

Jesus

FU Matrix, pull my plug if you’re not going to put any effort into making me think this BS is real anymore

So will thst death penalty that Trump talked about apply to the executives at this company? That might make sense.

I know this is pretty deep in the comments, but the rapper featured, 'A$AP Rocky' was making this video after going to prison for selling drugs, and being in a Movie called 'Dope'. So... if there is like an EGOT for drugs.. this guy is 3/4 there.

Couldn't they have just listened to a Future song?

Just the latest example that for-profit healthcare is immoral and should be abolished. Expand Medicare. M4A.

madewithguac I refuse to buy what their selling.

abhorrent

The very concept of advertising for drugs makes no sense other than to make money for corporate ghouls. It should be 100% banned in any society that actually cares about health and well-being.

but the real crime would be single payer healthcare

Perfectly natural perfectly cool

Fahrenthold Y'all are so brave...waiting till Opiods were the 1 killer in America to say anything... AdRevenue Complicit

It's like if Michael Scott sold pharmaceuticals that could kill you.

How can I watch the fentanyl rap video?

thats weird bc i was just think about how im going to dance and freestyle over drug execs graves

mollypriddy What the fuuuuuck

PANTSSteve

picardonhealth

Put them up against the wall, their family’s too

Shameful disgrace.

dear NASA please don’t send any more robots to mars. please send everyone involved in this instead, kthnx

Use big pharma money to fund the wall

There’s an old sketch from A Bit of Fry & Laurie with same basic premise: a man goes to a bank seeking a business loan so he can sell cocaine and heroin to children in brightly colored packaging they’ll find attractive.

Thank God for the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution

So illegal aliens are crossing the boarder, smuggling in large amounts of Fentanyl and then making shitty video's to promote it's use/abuse? Or are we confused about who the real threat is in regard to the Drug epidemic?

Gimme that high dose fetty dope

Pharmaceuticals corruption! CORRUPTION Pharmaceutical

All I got from this is that all of them are insane. The pharma reps and the physicians. Lesson of the story: don’t trust anyone trying to give you prescription drugs.

nbcsnl this is a skit right up your alley!

Classic case when companies are focused exclusively on profits, everything else be damned. Don’t they realize their children or friends might be at the receiving end of it?

sure why not. anything goes in hellworld baby

Immoral.

To paraphrase the broccoli guy in Daddy Day Care: 'F-E-N-TA-N-Y-L! The people who make me Are going to hell!'

I cannot

RyanMarino Man, I hope those dancers got a hit of naloxone after that exposure amirite wtfentanyl

All about the Benjamin’s

We are a garbage country.

Jesus fuck

In a battle between money and integrity, money wins much too often.

jshateuf

Opioid industry is evil.

_cingraham This is fucked up, but please somebody find a link to this video.

RabidBadger My distate brings all the boys to the yard!

Big money doing what they do. Damn the people full speed ahead.

TheLoveBel0w And marijuana is still federally illegal. 🤔

Release every drug offender from prison immediately

TheLoveBel0w Da phuc?

Please let this lead to the ban of advertising prescription drugs.

This is embarrasing and devastating! 😢

call Insys out in the headline!

Heck of a job, Trump and GOP.

Say what? Can’t B!

I hear millions of SoundCloud xanny rappers crying out in terror.

Homelessness & opioid epidemic go hand in hand..

Thank god pharma companies are never getting attacked for their huge campaign donations...

cool

My favorite rapper, Fenty Wap

Pure, pure, blatant evil. Burn them all.

Corporate death penalty, at the minimum.

When did they cross the border?

happylilcoo I get the distinct impression that a certain POTUS saw this and jammed the fuck out to it.

*sharpening guillotine blades*

I’m sorry, what?

scum of the earth

Put them all in jail.

this shit’s wack

w55unicorn Drug Pushers!

when the revolution happens they will be put in the gulag

I'm tryna hop on that remix tho

Capitalism and Greed at its finest ladies and gentlemen Murica

I thought this was a ClickHole article...

That is the kind of behavior that needs a lawsuit!

WHAT kind of monsters are people turning into? What is happening?

Sad to say, in addition to the Deplorables, we have many sicko Americans. Where did things go wrong? I think when Reagan killed public education in Calif.

thememorypalace !!

These employees might pay for being drug pushers, but their bosses are not accountable to US law due to their extreme wealth and white skin. The opioid crises will continue until their desire for wealth abates, which will be never.

Doctors have been getting major kickback 💰💰💰💰for years.

We should trust drug companies that makes vaccines too ?

Why would the sales reps of a pharma company even have a say in patient dosage Blow that whole toxic industry up.

Friends, don't let these reports(as awful as they are) alarm you into believing that pain medications are evil or don't have a very vital place in healthcare.

Fahrenthold Prison

out of touch VP's just can't help themselves

Was that wrong? Should they not have done that?

But were the rhymes dope? [Pun intended]

All about money/destroy at the same dam time, this shit killed a lot of people, not for nothing if that wasn't in the drug they probably wouldn't had died. You have people with no medical experiences trying to mesh that with other drugs to make it stronger and it's killin folks

This isn’t a TeamCoco sketch? Can we at least have it try to dunk?

Rob30376056 track down this video. I must see it!

Yeah perfectly normal.

You know there’s a Marketing VP who is removing this endorsement from their LinkedIn profile right now.

cc HumansOfLate

Fahrenthold Will they be sentenced to death based on today’s comments by our DearLeader ?

💩💩💩💩💩🤮🤮🤮🤮

Fahrenthold Arrest them all.

Barack Obama is a-SPRAYED of me

I’m a giant hip-hopping fentanyl, anyways here’s Liam with Wonderwall

'You can trust me - I'm a doctor.' 😶

~GOTTA OD WIT ME~

Thank God a pharma exec is now head of HHS. 🙃

Right. So. I worked briefly on a project for the Mississippi Crime Lab cataloguing opioid overdoses and trying to build a picture of what the opioid crisis looked like in Mississippi. Fentanyl was one of the most common drugs found in ppl's systems post-OD. This is grotesque.

HumansOfLate

ccollinsjr and we can't get medicinal marijuana federally legalized. Fuck these pharmaceutical companies and their employee drug dealers.

Fahrenthold Damn, crazy story. What are they teaching at sales conferences nowadays? “... former employee told jurors that she watched her boss — regional sales manager Sunrise Lee — give a lap dance at a Chicago nightclub to a doctor Insys was pushing to write more prescriptions.”

BillLeeTN let's keep looking at other methods than marijuana just in case lol.

Build a wall around Insys and fill it with concrete with the sales voice and execs inside

BigPharmaCartel

For context one spray is 60 times the dose we give at a time to ICU patients or those undergoing a procedure . 16 times a pretty high dose we give to a patient on a ventilator who has airway protection. How did this dangerous drug ever get approved? Besides bribes to the FDA

HumansOfLate

meh their older stuff was better

Sociopaths. Genuinely evil, cretinous people

DavidKlion I... I see words but they- the sentences they form just don't make any damn sense.

1 2 3 4 How Many Oxy in my Store. Suck my Syringe Big PHARMA 😂😂

Well my name is fentanyl and I'm here to say I'll be more relevant in five years in the saddest of ways

mediumvillain Wtf is this timeline?

Cool. Also the president just floated the idea of killing the addicts as a solution to the opiod crisis.

What the fuck

What the actual hell? I mean, the Simpsons parodied such a video... and a drug company actually made one?

'Bring me on down to Lawsuit-Ville! Timberlake SNL folloback

BUT THE BORDER IS THE REAL PROLBME!!!

Any companies who sell a potentially addictive substance for profit should be be forced to sell and be run by government. Nothing will stop these folks from trying to make $$ off of addicts.

Fahrenthold I'm thinking that whole 'free market' idea might have been oversold.

Fahrenthold Tip of the iceberg.

Fahrenthold We are the sickest society....

CollinEatonHC Now that's a party

Wait!! Those don’t look like illegal aliens!!

Fahrenthold

Unbelievable wtf

Sure looks like a May pole celebration.

Fahrenthold Good Lord 😡

Fahrenthold Lol but we need a border wall.

Fahrenthold WTAF

Fahrenthold Sick people.

Fahrenthold Throw those people in Jail

Yo Insys Therapeutics Blood on your hands, social scorn, all alone behind bars

Jail for all pharma execs

Capitalism is so good

🤬 I’ll bet they wouldn’t even use their own medicine. It’s that bad. 🤬

Fahrenthold Use once....be addicted.

Death To These Pigs

These people could be standing for the anthem and people would pass them off as 'patriotic americans' even though they won't hesitate to either sell you out for a dollar or defend those that do.

Disgusting. Nearly half of all primary care doctors received some kind of payment from a drug companies, and 61 percent of surgeons get money. Paying doctors to prescribe drugs needs to stop NOW!!!!

Now that's what I'm talking about! “What we built here can’t be debated. Shout to Kapoor for what he created,” the sales reps rap. “The competition just making noise. We’re making history because we’re great by choice.”

rachaelw28 .... somehow not TheOnion

Most of the drug sales reps are former cheerleaders and beauty queens. Not necessarily the brightest people out there and easily manipulated to pimp drugs.

HA! No way a wall could stopped a rapping giant highly addictive fentanyl bottle.

Bad

Why is this just coming out 4 years later? 🧐

It's all about the benjamins. Now find them, shame them and ultimately arrest them. Yea

Doesn't the FDA have to approve the drug first? That is the target! Supposed to be protecting us from ourselves (sarcasm) and instead approve a drug that should probably not been approved. Won't legalize Cannabis which actually can help get a person off fentanyl. Wrong target.

Is this a flippen SNL skit? (Or as Donny Jr says S&L)

MAGA.

The video ALONE should have made doctors question things..but those doctors still took the bribes. They should all lose their licenses for being stupid.

Where is the video? I wanna watch it!

Only difference between these guys and Avon Barksdale is the companies executives won’t see anywhere close to 25 to life mandatory sentences

Glad that shit is a joke to them but that's big Pharma for ya get people addicted cause they have pills to treat addiction too, it's just a revolving door situation.

Drugs - build a wall around American pharmaceutical companies.

A legitimate national emergency where we know the bad guys are truly bad and exactly who they are.

Even the soulless ghouls of the prescription medication advertising trade have to be recoiling in horror at this.

Shkrelli?

legal drugs are taking over the cartel businesses

This isn't news worthy, their just overpaid drug whores.

Absolute SCUMBAGS! Worse than EL CHAPO! They only locked up el chapo because he wasn’t pushing “their drugs” he was a competitor! BigPharma Criminals CartelsWithDegrees

Anything involved with Rap is usually a bad sign

this is what happens when brands try to be cool online

HumansOfLate

Woah

That is wrong. And lame. Very very lame.

Female Pharmaceutical Sales Reps are usually overeducated hookers

A Rip A rap A Rip Rap Ronton Lets get the world hooked on Oxycontin

Why did our highly educated doctors buy into this crap?

I smell a sitcom

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