‘Pain Hustlers’: The True Story Behind Chris Evans and Emily Blunt’s New Netflix Movie
A new Netflix movie is taking a look at the dark side of the pharmaceutical industry. Pain Hustlers stars Emily Blunt and Chris Evans as Liza and Pete, a pair of sales reps pushing a powerful new opioid medication called Lonafen to doctors. Though the drug was designed for cancer patients, the greedy company has decided to market the product more widely, with deadly results. Blunt’s character, a single mom desperate to pay for her daughter’s medical treatment, initially is an eager participant in the scheme until she realizes the harm she’s causing.
Liza, Pete, and Zanna Therapeutics boss Jack Neel (Andy Garcia) are all fictional characters. But Pain Hustlers is inspired by a real story of corporate greed and malfeasance.
‘Pain Hustlers’ true story is inspired by Insys Therapeutics
Like Netflix’s recent limited series Painkiller, which chronicled how Purdue Pharma’s marketing of OxyContin spawned the opioid crisis, Pain Hustlers has a true story as its inspiration. The movie draws from Even Hughes’ 2018 New York Times Magazine story, “The Pain Hustlers,” as well as his book of the same name.
Hughes’ story focused on a company called Insys Therapeutics, which was marketing a powerful fentanyl-based painkiller called Subsys. Sales of the new drug were lackluster, so the company devised a kickback scheme. It paid hefty speaker fees to physicians who prescribed Subsys to patients. Many of the sales reps whom the company hired were young, attractive women with little experience in the pharmaceutical industry. The targeted doctors were sometimes already running pill mills or had financial problems that made them susceptible to bribes.
Are Chris Evans and Emily Blunt’s ‘Pain Hustlers’ characters based on real people?
Pain Hustlers is based on a true story, and several of the movie’s characters are inspired by real people. However, the names have been changed.
Zanna Therapeutics CEO Jack Neel is based on Insys founder John Kapoor. Like Neel, Kapoor was inspired to create Subsys after watching his late wife battle breast cancer. Chris Evans’ Pete Brenner character appears to be based on Alec Burlakoff, the Insys exec who created the sales program, as well as Insys’ former CEO Michael Babich. The scene in Pain Hustlers where Pete performs a rap at a sales conference is inspired by a real Subsys rap video that Insys produced (via YouTube).
According to Pain Hustlers director David Yates, Emily Blunt’s character was created for the movie. “Liza was our invention, a single mum with a daughter struggling with health issues, a dreamer, undervalued but incredibly capable,” he told Netflix’s Tudum.
However, elements of Liza’s character also seem drawn from real life. Sunrise Lee was a single mom working as an exotic dancer in Florida. Burkaloff was one of her customers, and he later recruited her as an Insys sales rep. That’s similar to how Pete recruits Liza in the movie.
What happened to Insys Therapeutics?
Eventually, the federal government cracked down on Insys Therapeutics and its shady marketing and sales practices. In 2020, Kapoor was sentenced to 5½ years in prison on racketeering charges. Burlakoff received a 26-month sentence and Babich was sentenced to 2½ years. Lee was sentenced to a year in prison.
In 2019, Insys agreed to pay $225 million to resolve the criminal and civil cases against it. The company later filed for bankruptcy. It sold Subsys to another drug company, which agreed to market the drug only to cancer patients.
Pain Hustlers is now streaming on Netflix.
Source: New York Post
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