Hollywood has never shied away from provocative subject matter like the opioid epidemic, and that goes double for a major streamer like Netflix, which has already released "Painkiller" and "The Fall of the House of the Usher" in short order. If there's a way to tell a new story about fascinating but morally compromised characters selling everything but their souls in order to make a quick buck off of the misery of others, well, you can bet that a filmmaker will find it. Honestly, even if there wasn't a new way to do it, somebody would try anyway. "Pain Hustlers" lands somewhere in the middle of those two extremes, judging by the rather mixed reception to the movie. /Film's Rafael Motamayor reviewed the film and ended up on the more negative side of the equation, saying that, "At its best, the film is just a nice time spent watching Emily Blunt...
- 11/5/2023
- by Jeremy Mathai
- Slash Film
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’ is inspired by the story of Insys Therapeutics
Like Netflix’s recent limited series Painkiller, which chronicled how Purdue Pharma’s marketing of OxyContin spawned the opioid crisis,...
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’ is inspired by the story of Insys Therapeutics
Like Netflix’s recent limited series Painkiller, which chronicled how Purdue Pharma’s marketing of OxyContin spawned the opioid crisis,...
- 10/31/2023
- by Megan Elliott
- Showbiz Cheat Sheet
Pain and medication are things that fall under our daily routine. A human survives with pain, both physical and mental. People avoid psychological pain with temporary distraction, while physical pain becomes difficult to ignore from moment to moment. Cancer’s “breakthrough” pain, which equates to an unusual death agony, forces people to find quick solutions. In 2012, a pharma company called Insys Therapeutic came up with a cure that seemed almost magical. Their pharmaceutical company produced Subsys, a medicinal spray containing a significant dose of fentanyl, which not only cures pain but turns people into addicts.
Helmed by David Yates, Pain Hustlers is a film that follows a fictional retelling of the Insys Therapeutic fraud. Based on an investigative article in The New York Times by Evan Hughes and its later book adaptation called The Hard Sell: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup, Yates’ Pain Hustler follows the journey of Liza Drake,...
Helmed by David Yates, Pain Hustlers is a film that follows a fictional retelling of the Insys Therapeutic fraud. Based on an investigative article in The New York Times by Evan Hughes and its later book adaptation called The Hard Sell: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup, Yates’ Pain Hustler follows the journey of Liza Drake,...
- 10/27/2023
- by Poulami Nanda
- Film Fugitives
On Thursday, a Boston jury found that John Kapoor, founder of pharmaceutical company Insys, as well as four high-ranking executives at the company guilty of racketeering on the grounds that they had conspired to boost sales of one of its fentanyl-based medications.
After deliberating for 15 hours, the jury found that the five individuals had bribed doctors to prescribe Subsys, an under-the-tongue fentanyl spray approved to treat patients with cancer. A synthetic opioid that is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, fentanyl is highly addictive and dangerous; nearly half of the...
After deliberating for 15 hours, the jury found that the five individuals had bribed doctors to prescribe Subsys, an under-the-tongue fentanyl spray approved to treat patients with cancer. A synthetic opioid that is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, fentanyl is highly addictive and dangerous; nearly half of the...
- 5/3/2019
- by EJ Dickson
- Rollingstone.com
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