BOSTON - A federal jury on Thursday found the top executives of Insys Therapeutics, a company that sold a fentanyl-based painkiller, guilty of racketeering charges in a rare criminal prosecution that blamed corporate officials for contributing to the nation's opioid epidemic.
The verdict against Insys executives is a sign of the accelerating effort to hold pharmaceutical and drug distribution companies and their executives and owners accountable in ways commensurate with the devastation wrought by the prescription opioid crisis.
Also on Thursday, the state of West Virginia reached a US$37 million settlement in a lawsuit against the McKesson Corp, one of the nation's leading drug distributors, which was accused of shipping nearly 100 million doses of opioids to residents over a six-year period.