60 Minutes - 6/21/2020: The Chief, The Opioid Playbook

Episode Date: June 22, 2020

Lesley Stahl interviews Minneapolis' Police Chief Medaria Arradondo as the department still reels from the killing of George Floyd. A Bill Whitaker investigation uncovers drug companies' playbook to push opioids, and how law enforcement has scrambled to hold pharma executives accountable for fueling the opioid epidemic. Those stories on this week's "60 Minutes." To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Grocer $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. The president of the police union, Robert Kroll, has defended the officers in this case,

and he's called the Black Lives Matter movement a terrorist organization. He and others are going to have to come to a reckoning that either they are going to be on the right side of history or they're going to be on the wrong side of history, or they will be left behind. What's the key to being a successful salesman in the pharmaceutical, especially the opioid, end of the business? The key to success?

The less of a conscience you had, the better. 60 Minutes spent a year investigating the playbook of sales practices that triggered an explosion of powerful, addictive opioid prescriptions. What we found was seedy and outrageous. I think sometimes white-collar criminals are more dangerous than violent criminals. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper.

I'm John Wertheim. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes. On Memorial Day, a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on a black man's neck until he was unresponsive. The killing of George Floyd sparked the protests we've seen around the country. With Minneapolis on edge and under scrutiny, the pressure is on the city's police chief, Madera Arredondo, a 30-year veteran and the first black man to head the mostly white police department.

He fired the four officers involved within 24 hours. We spoke with the chief remotely, discussing the events of May 25th, the video that ignited it all, and the police response, which started with a lie. So as I understand it, there was something released to the press that George Floyd had resisted arrest and that he had, I'm going to read this, died, quote, after a medical incident during a police interaction. And that was preliminary information. That was absolutely an official police statement. However, that was not accurate. So it makes you wonder, doesn't it, that if there hadn't been that video that someone took on their phone, that would have been the end of it. And our communities have said that for many years.

When these incidents occur, if they're not captured on video, are their voices going to be taken as truthful? And that cuts to the very core of why we have distrust in our communities, quite frankly. It was a 17-year-old who recorded this now infamous video showing that truth. George Floyd wasn't resisting arrest. He died after a police officer, Derek Chauvin, pressed his knee into Floyd's neck for nearly eight minutes. Floyd said, I can't breathe more than ten times. When I saw that video, it was probably in my 30-plus years the most heart-wrenching emotional image that I had ever seen.

Officer Chauvin's demeanor, he was so relaxed. He was just, it seemed, so confident that he was going to get away with this. Well, whatever he might have expected, he did not receive that from me. I am going to read you something about your own policies related to neck restraints. And it says that the officers can use, quote, neck restraints, non-deadly force, defined as compressing one or both sides of a person's neck with an arm or leg without applying direct pressure to the trachea or airwaves in the front of the neck. That policy does not state that you apply your full entire body weight with your knee

on an individual who's not resisting, cutting off his hair. That would not be anything I'd condone or was anything intended in that particular policy that you read there. And you just, I believe, banned chokeholds. Absolutely. But you're going to keep the policy of allowing neck restraints? No, those are banned. Absolutely. The lawyer for the other officers is saying they were rookies and they were just following the instructions of the senior officer. I don't craft policy or make policy based on years of service. I expect and our community expects your humanity and your moral compass to rise above. And so if you fail to intervene,

either verbally or physically, to me, you're complicit. Don't shoot! Even while protests broke out across the country over George Floyd's death, I think you've had too much to drink to be driving. another black man was shot by a white officer in Atlanta. And 24 hours later, the Atlanta police chief resigned.

We asked Chief Arredondo, Did you ever consider stepping down? No, I did not consider stepping down. When George Floyd's death occurred, my minutes and my hours and my days were consumed with really trying to keep this city held together. The killing of George Floyd was not the first incident in the Twin Cities that triggered rage in the Black community. In 2015, another white officer killed 24-year-old Jamar Clark, setting off 18 days of protests. The officer and his partner were never charged. I told him not to reach for it. I told him to get his head out. One year later, Philando Castile was killed during a traffic stop over a broken

taillight with his girlfriend and daughter in the car. The officer was charged with manslaughter, but was acquitted. In 2018, Thurman Blevins, 31, was killed by two white police officers who opened fire as he ran away with a gun. No criminal charges were brought. But in a striking comparison, in 2017, Justine Damond, a white woman who had called 911, was killed by a black officer, Mohamed Noor. He was convicted of third-degree murder and manslaughter and is serving a 12-and-a-half-year prison sentence. By last month's killing of George Floyd, Chief Arradondo said the Minneapolis black community had had enough. Within a few hours, we had both protests becoming more violent. We had large groups of individuals who had overrun security around a precinct. We had large-scale looting, fires, shots being fired.

You know, there's some complaining that the police backed away. They didn't protect property. Stores were going up in flames. People were running in and out of stores unhampered. It all broke down. What happened? So, yes, there were absolutely businesses that we could not respond to, but we had to tend to people that were being assaulted, shots being fired.

And so preservation of life for me as chief is going to always be the number one priority. So that was a policy that night. Let the looting happen? As devastating as it is, I did not want us to have a series of funerals because of people being fatally wounded or hurt. The property damage in Minneapolis is estimated at more than $100 million. The mainly peaceful protesters are calling for reforms, including dismantling or defunding the police department.

I heard somebody say, look, we have to get rid of the Minneapolis Police Department. We just have to get rid of it. It is so broke, it cannot be fixed. Each and every day, I hear from community members who rely upon us, who are saying that we cannot afford to take away a public safety mechanism when we still have a lawless society. Now, they also say we need good policing. We know it's broken. We need to make changes. Our community has every right to... A week after the George Floyd killing, the chief went to the site, which has become kind of a shrine.

I wanted to pay my respects to Mr. Floyd, and it so just happened that, again, that's my neighborhood. I grew up a block away from where he died. He grew up in this house in the 1970s, one of nine children to parents who instilled in him, he said, a respect for public service. Chief, were you ever stopped? Were you ever pulled over just because you're black? Yeah, yeah. In my experience, that shouldn't be shocking.

We are a society. We are a group of beings that have implicit bias. And that occurs. When did it occur for you? I think it was just driving through the city streets, and this happened years ago, it occurs. It does occur in this country. I want to ask about your own children. Yes. Were you ever worried when they just went out for a walk or went in their car that they would be stopped just because of the color of their skin? Unfortunately, I've had to have that same talk that many black fathers have to have with their sons about what to do if you happen to be stopped by the police. And the conversations when I'm having that with my son and other fathers have had that with their sons, it's about survival. It's telling that 13 years ago, Madera Arredondo and four other black police officers

sued the department for racial discrimination. In their complaint, they said that every African-American officer received a hate letter signed KKK through interoffice mail. The case was settled for $740,000. You're the chief now. You brought this suit, and we're talking about the same things. It is not the same. The fact that I'm sitting before you today as chief, I think, is indicative that some progress has been made. Among his reforms are ending low-level marijuana stings and toughening body camera requirements. The Minneapolis black community makes up 19 percent of the city's

population, but only 11 percent of the nearly 900-member police force. The vast majority of the white officers don't live in the city, but in the suburbs. Is there racial animosity within the force itself? I'm not seeing that right now, but we also have to attack and address the systemic challenges and barriers that exist in that. The chief says those barriers protect police against charges of misconduct. Officer Derek Chauvin had at least 17 complaints against him, but only received two letters of reprimand. Chief Arredondo says he is stymied by the contract he negotiates with the city police union and has broken off talks. The contract has allowed officers who are fired or disciplined to bring that to

arbitration. I've seen some statistics about this arbitration you're talking about. You fire someone and eventually that police officer brings it to arbitration. And in nearly half of those cases, half of those cases, that police officer is reinstated. Half the officers who you fire, you have to take back and put out on the street. That's correct. If we have even one who is allowed to come back, that sets us back. That erodes that confidence. That erodes that public trust. Is the bottom line that you cannot weed out the so-called

bad apples and you cannot fully discipline to the extent you want to because of the union contract? It is problematic, absolutely, yes. And so I cannot in good faith work with a contract that diminishes my authority as chief, but also erodes that public trust that our communities need so much right now. And you have suspended the negotiations. I, as chief, am stepping away from that. I'm taking a deliberate pause. The union's president, Robert Kroll, was named in Chief Arredondo's own civil rights complaint 13 years ago as someone who made racist statements. The president of the police union, Robert Kroll, has defended the officers in this case, and he's called the Black Lives Matter movement a terrorist organization. And I just wonder if his attitudes, his outlook, is having an influence on your police force. He absolutely is an influencer.

And I've continued to have very serious conversations with him. And he and others are going to have to come to a reckoning that either they are going to be on the right side of history or they're going to be on the wrong side of history. But or they will be left behind or they will be left behind. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade.

Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck. Available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. opioids began with the aggressive marketing of narcotics to treat chronic pain. Tonight, we reveal the story of the powerfully addictive, fast-acting opioid fentanyl. Our year-long investigation, which concluded just as the coronavirus was spreading, uncovered the playbook of sales practices that triggered an explosion of prescriptions. We will introduce you to two insiders on different sides of the law,

a top opioid salesman whose rise and fall spanned the epidemic, but first, federal agent Greg Tremaglio, who in 2003 saw the crisis coming and tried to stop it. If you're going to intentionally, knowingly break the law, your profits have to be so significant that when the FDA comes knocking and they hit you with a $425 million penalty, you're still smiling. You're sad in front of them, but when you walk out the door, you're smiling. You're smiling because you just made a billion dollars worth of profit. And it's worth it to them. It's worth it. When Greg Tremaglio looks back at the carnage caused by the rise in the use and abuse of

opioids, one early case sticks in his mind. In 2003, he was the senior special agent assigned to the undercover arm of the Food and Drug Administration's D.C. Office of Criminal Investigations. His target? Cephalon, one of several drug companies doing business in ways that brazenly flouted FDA regulations. They weren't afraid of the FDA. Why would they be? Back then, you only received a misdemeanor. Nobody was prosecuted. So they're willing to take that slap on the wrist because the benefits are so great. Yes. Profits are too big. Way too big.

At the time when a drug company was caught violating FDA regulations, federal prosecutors typically would negotiate corporate settlement agreements without holding individual pharmaceutical executives accountable. But Agent Greg Tremaglio hoped this time would be different. His investigation revealed Cephalon was violating strict FDA laws on drug promotion with three drugs, including a synthetic opioid, Actique, a dangerous, fast-acting fentanyl, sold in lollipop form for easy absorption through the mouth. The drug is 100 times more powerful than morphine,

intended for severe cancer pain only. These drugs are so powerful that they received approval by FDA for their indicated use, which was strictly for cancer patients with severe pain that have a tolerance level to other opioids. So morphine's not working for them anymore, and they're still in severe pain, and they need something that's going to give them a recovery immediately.

That's what this lollipop is. For people in end-stage cancer? Yes. A doctor can prescribe things off-label. So what was wrong with what they were doing? Yeah, in the FDA, we call that the practice of medicine. We give medical doctors the ability to prescribe whatever they think's going

to help treat their patients. But that's with the understanding that the medical doctor is getting presented with accurate factual information from the drug sales rep. They're not being groomed to promote drugs off-label. The FDA-approved labeling for Cephalon's fentanyl drug, Actique, also called the package insert, tells doctors and patients who should take Actique and how it should be used. The document carries the weight of a legally binding agreement between the FDA and drug companies limiting how sales reps can promote a drug. Pushing a drug for patient groups not listed on the label, spreading misleading information, or publicizing a potentially deadly drug as less dangerous than FDA evaluations

indicate is called off-label promotion, and it's against the law. Profit over patient health, we call it. Doesn't matter what the drug's indicated use is. If I'm a sales rep, I'm hustling it, I'm slinging it as fast as I can. If not for cancer, what else would they be pushing this drug to be used for? Pain is pain. That's their motto. So whether you have a migraine, pop a fentanyl lollipop. Whether you have a back injury, take a fentanyl lollipop.

It didn't matter. Alec Berlikoff was a star sales representative at Cephalon. He told us he would say almost anything to convince doctors to prescribe Actique on or off label. Before joining Cephalon, he was a standout sales rep at Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson. Wherever he worked, he says, the sales tactics were the same. Ignore the FDA's off-label promotion laws. I was taught to forget the patient, to not think about the patient. Take the human aspect out of it. It's like selling widgets.

Were you not aware of what these opioids were doing to communities around the country? What is your job? What is your title? Sales. Sell. Do you understand? Either understand or pack your bags. What's the key to being a successful salesman in the pharmaceutical, especially the opioid, end of the business? The key to success? The less of a conscience you had, the better. 60 Minutes went to court in Oklahoma to get Cephalon's internal documents unsealed,

the drugmaker's master plan for promoting its powerful drug Actique, a virtual how-to for breaking federal law. The documents reveal Cephalon's strategy was to broaden the use of the opioid beyond cancer patients with severe pain to the general pain market, including but not limited to osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic back pain, migraine headaches. Getting doctors to prescribe the drug off-label was, quote, the most critical component of the ACT-T tactical plan.

They push you right to the line, and if you go to that line every single day, what happens? Eventually, you start to cross the line. And they want you to cross that line. I guess you would have to run through the risks of abuse when you're talking to the doctors about the drugs, but with a wink and a nod? Not even.

If you go through training like me as a young man, you drink the Kool-Aid. You drink it like a fire hose. I'll never forget. You can go as high as you want as long as they're still in pain. The federal investigation of Cephalon began in January 2003, when a sales rep with a troubled conscience got in touch with Greg Tremaglio, telling him Cephalon was pushing its sales team to break the law. To gather hard evidence, Agent Tremaglio got

approval from federal prosecutors to wire up the sales rep and conduct a surveillance operation of company employees at this Nevada hotel, site of the drugmaker's annual sales conference and training sessions. Set it up right out of the hotel room where we managed the source as we wired them up and we sent them in and we listened to the group of conversations. You were listening in? We're listening to the techniques of how to train somebody to sell drugs. And they're being encouraged by senior drug reps. I like the way you steered the doctor away from the label

and you talked about severe migraine sufferers. How to groom a doctor. Yes. What is your reaction to what you're hearing? I was disgusted. It was just so open, the conversations about disregarding the label and breaking the law. It's almost like a game to a lot of the sales reps. How many doctors do I have under my control, and how many prescriptions, or what we call scripts,

how many are they issuing every single week? Agent Romaglio recorded days of damning conversations between sales reps, providing accounts of their strategies. It sounded to him more like the corrupt tactics of an organized criminal operation. They targeted what we call pill mill doctors first. Do they go visit the doctor to see if he has a glint in his eye and see if he seems willing to play? It starts there. It's a long process. You've got those that are established pill mills, what we call them, pain clinics that the doctors that just had no conscience. And then you had the

ones that you're slowly grooming and developing and where they feel comfortable prescribing the drug off-label. The internal Cephalon document, 60 minutes obtained, showed just how Cephalon roped in willing or vulnerable physicians. It funded advocacy groups to promote opioids, spread deceptive information about addiction, and offered incentives for doctors to prescribe opioids, including medical education programs, conference junkets, free dining and drinking, and lucrative peer-to-peer speaking engagements. The master plan noted that, quote, these programs generate immediate script impact. In other words, they got doctors to write more prescriptions. And if they can't convince you, they have other doctors that they've already paid

that they can reach out to. If you don't believe me, hey. Talk to your peer, except they don't tell the doctor, oh, your peer has been to four vacation spots over the last year and we paid them approximately $200,000 of some astronomical consulting fee. It's garbage. It's no different than a bribe. No different from a bribe. We're just calling it what it is. Instead of bribing doctors, we're calling it educational consulting, medical education program, fancy words. On the street, they just call it something different. What do they call it on the street? It's just a straight hustle. The only difference is they're in a suit and tie when they do their hustle. That's the only difference.

When Agent Tramaglio approached other sales reps at the 2003 Cephalon Conference to cooperate as informants, word of the surveillance operation leaked out. After word got out that you were there... All week. Listening in. To their training, they scrambled like cockroaches. Literally within 30 minutes, there was probably 100 taxi cabs out front. And we were sitting out our window watching the drug reps running out to get into the cabs to leave. So what happens?

Before I even got back to Washington, D.C., my phone was already ringing. It was a senior official in his FDA division who was unaware of the extent of the operation, which was authorized by federal prosecutors. Greg Tremaglio told us the official objected to the aggressive investigative procedures. Agent Tremaglio was immediately pulled off the case. My boss did not appreciate that. FDA did not appreciate that.

That was a tactic that they were not comfortable with. Why was that? Because it's a white-collar case. You can't treat them like a drug cartel. You should treat them differently? With respect, because they're a legitimate pharmaceutical company. They're breaking the law. People are becoming addicted, dying from their practices.

Why would the FDA, the government, want to sort of tiptoe around them? The FDA was afraid of the big pharmas. But you were providing them with the proof. I had the proof. Were they duped or were they complicit? I just think they stuck their head in the sand. What were you going for? The king they stuck their head in the sand. What were you going for?

The kingpin. The head of the snake. The executives at the top of Cephalon. We never got that far. The case ended in 2008 when Cephalon pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for illegal promotion and paid $425 million in fines and settlements, less than a quarter of what Cephalon made in one year. The company was eventually sold for $6.8 billion. Alec Berlikoff found a new home in 2012, working for a pharmaceutical mogul named John Kapoor, they would rack up huge profits selling Subsys, a new formulation of fentanyl. Like Actique, it was FDA approved for cancer pain only.

And on the strength of Subsist sales, Kapoor's company became a Wall Street sensation, one fueled by unbelievable greed and depravity. In the midst of the deadly epidemic, incest sales reps got doctors to prescribe opioids for unapproved uses, enticing them with all-expenses-paid visits to strip clubs, fancy dinners, and with money, which federal prosecutors say corrupted the practice of medicine. This time, there would be no settlement. Insys was targeted as an organized criminal enterprise, and its top executives were prosecuted. In January, John Kapoor, billionaire entrepreneur and former CEO of Incest Therapeutics, arrived at a federal courthouse in Boston for sentencing.

A jury had found him, along with several of his top executives, guilty of racketeering, mail and wire fraud, conspiring to recklessly and illegally boost profits from the opioid painkiller Subsys, a fentanyl spray designed to be absorbed under the tongue. Kapoor received five and a half years. His lieutenants received from 12 to 33 months, in part because of the testimony of the government's star witness, Alec Berlikoff, the senior vice president of sales at INSIS, who had pled guilty and cooperated with prosecutors. We talked with Alec Berlikoff with the consent of federal prosecutors before he was sentenced in January, but after he had testified about illegal sales tactics at INSIS,

including bribing physicians. The doctors, are they an easy mark? No. Most doctors would throw you out? Absolutely. And the faster you get thrown out, the better. Get thrown out, move on to the next guy, keep going, keep going, keep going. And eventually somebody is going to stop and talk to you,

and you start to wonder why. I'm a sales representative. I'm not a doctor. The doctor is looking at you, and he's saying to himself, what's in it for me? W-I-F-M. We call it the WIFM. The WIFM. WIFM.

If they're saying what's in it for me? Then you know you've got one on the hook. You've got one on the hook. It doesn't mean you're going to be successful, but you're going to figure out real quick that the more you pay that doctor, the more he's going to prescribe. John Kapoor was a pharmaceutical industry success story. He immigrated to the United States from India

and as an executive and investor, made a fortune with a series of drug companies. You, as an entrepreneur, have to have a dream. And then you work with passion to make that dream come true. John Kapoor hired Alec Berlikoff after the salesman regaled him with stories from his days at Cephalon, bribing doctors, he said, paying them for speaking engagements. He pounded the table and he said, that's our next VP of sales. Kapoor asked him to start a similar speaker program at INSYS.

I felt like I finally made it to the big leagues. And John Kapoor was asking you to do this? Yes. He wanted me to pay doctors to prescribe substance. I could do that. I've done it before. I can do it again. And you had talked about bribery. Oh, yeah. Use that word. If I think that he's going to be intimidated by the word bribery or that he hasn't been involved in that before on numerous occasions, I'm a fool. Insists would pay some doctors, sales reps called them whales, as much as $125,000 a year in bribes, camouflaged as Insys speaker program fees.

All that money caught the attention of federal prosecutors in Boston, Nathaniel Yeager and David Lazarus. These doctors, these whales, were getting paid to speak 40, 50 times a year. So when you think about a speaker, you think of them going to, say, a ballroom, and you have other doctors there, and the speaker gets up and makes a speech about the benefits of this drug. Right. That's not what was going on.

No, no. What was going on, they say, was illegal, and the two prosecutors launched what would become the first criminal case to bring pharmaceutical executives to trial for fueling the opioid epidemic. They indicted seven INSYS executives, including CEO John Kapoor and sales vice president Alec Berlikoff. It's not something that people think about, but the reality is that doctors are licensed drug dealers. And the pharmaceutical companies know that. At the heart of the indictment was the Insys Speakers Program.

And this is what it looked like, posted by one New York doctor on Instagram. It isn't easy being me. Hashtag friends. Sales reps hired to recruit doctors for the speakers program didn't need to be experienced pharmaceutical salesmen like Alec Berlikoff. Here in this picture he gave us of his management team. But it did help if they had charm and sex appeal. They had people whose previous jobs were being a waitress at Hooters,

people who worked at strip clubs, camp counselors. Yeager and Lazarus called the speaker's program a sham. The doctor would just repeatedly invite her friends or his friends. Just a night out paid by incis. Right. Rack up a big bar bill and then get a check in the mail for it. Was it that blatant? It was that blatant.

The sales staff was taught to look for doctors who might be going through a rough time. And they would literally list what their strengths and weaknesses were, and one of the things they would say is divorced, needs money. Former senior vice president of sales, Alec Berlikoff, says the terms of the bribe were clearly spelled out to the doctor. Increase the number and dose of prescriptions, or the speaker's spigot would be turned off. If you don't produce a return on investment of at least two to one via prescriptions of

substance, not only will you disappear from the Speaker's Bureau, but your representative will be gone as well. And you flat out told the doctor this? Yes. One, the more you write, the more you're going to earn. The more you increase the strength, the more you're going to earn. And doctor, if you don't like it, we walk away as friends. No big deal. But in the case against John Kapoor, the ROI, return on investment, was a big deal.

Kapoor used real-time data from an FDA patient safety program to track the doctors they were bribing, pouring over patient dosages and prescriptions at the sales meeting held every morning, calling out his executives when they missed their targets. He's looking at the chart and he sees perhaps a doctor is not prescribing as much as he thinks he should be. How would he react? Well, he would be irate. Within 24 hours, that rep was demanded to be in that doctor's office and basically enforcing that they increase the dose. He was requiring you to push doses higher than the patient actually needed?

He made it mandatory that we launch what he called an effective dose campaign. And what is that? It's a fancy way of basically saying, let's make sure that the patient will come back and want more. Others might say, let's make sure we get the patients addicted. You're preying on these people. Yeah, because they're desperate. They'll try anything. And they may get relief from substance initially,

but we all know what's going to happen. We know. We've been doing this long enough. We know how it ends. And that is? It ends in addiction, withdrawal, pain, suffering, and even death. And you didn't care about that?

Back then, I was numb to that. I was flabbergasted. As the trial approached, Fred Weishack joined the prosecution team to prepare the racketeering case. He pressured Alec Berlikoff to flip and testify against Kapoor. Best known for bringing down the Boston Mafia and crime boss Whitey Bulger, Wyshak thought he had seen it all, until this, his first pharmaceutical case.

And this is coming from a man who's gone after the mob. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the mob does have, to some extent, a code of conduct. And usually they're only physically harming other bad guys. These people, they didn't care. It wasn't just bad guys who were getting hurt. And what was the impact this criminal activity was having on the consumers, the patients? Most of the patients who received this drug were non-cancer patients.

Taking subsets essentially over-medicated them. It ruined their lives. Many of them lost their jobs. Their families fell apart. Some were hallucinating. They all became addicted. Teeth falling out, becoming zombie-like was a result of being given a medication this powerful that you don't need.

It was very compelling testimony. Some of them were shown insurance records that claimed that they had diagnoses that they'd never had and reacted to the fact that, I didn't have cancer, I didn't have that diagnosis. Prosecutors called that insurance fraud. INSYS CEO John Kapoor set up a scam to get insurance companies to pay for the drugs that were prescribed. He had INSYS employees pose as doctor's office staff to dupe the insurers.

Prosecutors obtained recordings of the calls and played them for the jury. What medication are you speaking of today? This is for sepsis. So they're sitting in a windowless room in Arizona saying, oh, the weather's beautiful here in Houston today. Or, oh, it's cold up here in New York. They would outright lie. They would say the patient had cancer when they didn't have cancer.

And they knew. They kept track at INSYS of what answers would work with individual insurance companies. INSYS executives prepared a script for call center workers that almost assured the insurance companies would pay. And the patient's diagnosis? It's for the breakthrough pain, yes. Malignant cancer pain? Yes, ma'am.

Nine times out of ten, that drug's getting approved. And this worked? It worked for years. It helped make Insys so lucrative that when the company went public in 2013, it became the number one IPO in the country, worth more than a billion dollars. In court, prosecutors exposed a culture of greed. To make their case, they played for the jury an in-house company video about titration, a medical technique used to increase a patient's dosage.

I think the jury was disgusted when they saw that. I know I was disgusted. INSA's sales reps rapping, boasting about doctors under their control, upping patients' dosage of subsus. In costume, the biggest dose, 1,600 micrograms. This was shown to a packed annual sales convention in Arizona in 2015. Woo! Ending with a cameo by Alec Berlikoff. I'm a little titration, yeah, that's not a problem. Everybody laughed?

I'm sorry to say everybody laughed, yes. The opioid crisis is raging outside the doors, and you're inside joking about it. Yes. The opioid crisis is raging outside the doors, and you're inside joking about it. Yes. We were all desensitized to what was going on. On January 23rd, a federal judge sentenced Alec Berlikoff to 26 months. I'm sorry. Very sorry. And ordered him to turn over the $4.3 million he had made

at the company. A dozen doctors were also convicted of crimes in connection with Insys. The company went bankrupt, and CEO John Kapoor is to report to federal prison in July to begin serving his sentence of five and a half years. As for Wyshak and the federal prosecution team, this case launched a new, tougher approach to corporate crime. I think sometimes white-collar criminals are more dangerous than violent criminals, and more often than not, they get a kid glove treatment, and I think that needs to stop. Now, an update on a story we called Targeting the Truth.

Last November, we reported on the Philippine government's clampdown on independent journalists, in particular, Maria Ressa and her online news site, Rappler. Ressa's stories, revealing the extent of government-sponsored violence in President Rodrigo Duterte's bloody drug war, resulted in what she describes as a government campaign against her, including death threats, organized social media attacks, and several arrests. The head of that arresting group told our reporter, be silent or you're next.

And that is exactly what the government is doing, systematically. Be silent or you're next. Eleven cases have been filed against you? They were looking for some way to be able to shut us up, right? I think you just have to look at the pattern. This past week, a Philippine court found Maria Ressa guilty of cyber libel. She is free on bail, pending an appeal. I'm Bill Whitaker.

We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes. Happy Father's Day.