Pain Hustlers, starring Emily Blunt, Chris Evans, and Andy Garcia, is a current film about the opiate problem in America. It was directed by Harry Potter mastermind David Yates.
In the film, Blunt portrays a single mother who has recently lost her job and takes a job with a pharmaceutical firm run by Garcia (who is paying doctors to give the company’s extremely addictive medications).
The based-on-reality thriller is currently streaming on Netflix, so let’s take a look at its stellar cast and the other works in which we may have seen it.
Netflix Pain Hustlers True Story
The video was inspired by an investigation published in the New York Times Magazine by Evan Hughes in 2018 into Insys, a firm created by billionaire John Kapoor. Subsys, an opioid medicine marketed by Kapoor, was developed to alleviate “breakthrough” cancer agony.
Insys added a spray delivery method to generic medicine, which allowed them to market it as a superior product. (In the film, the business selling the opioid medicine is called Zanna, and the drug is called Lonafin.)
Kapoor achieved greatness through what is commonly known as a “speaker program.” The truth is that he was convincing doctors to give patients who were already susceptible excessive doses of extremely addictive medicine that they did not need. In 2020, Kapoor was given a 66-month prison term for “racketeering conspiracy” and bribing medical professionals.
“This was this kind of scrappy startup, and they had this wild rags to riches tale,” Hughes said of the initial story. ‘Outrageous’ is a term I’d use to characterize the plot and the movie, and it works in more than one context.
The narrative is morally outrageous since it takes place against the backdrop of patients being wounded. It is outrageous in the sense that it is wild, bigger than life, chaotic, and amusing.
Hughes eventually published a book based on the essay, titled The Hard Sell: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Start-Up.
Director David Yates was intrigued by the dramatic tale of corruption in the pharmaceutical sector, and he turned it into a fictional narrative, with certain portions presented in the style of a documentary, further muddying the waters between fact and fiction.
How is Pain Hustlers Different From the Book and Article?
One reason is the comedy. All the genuine persons involved who acquired addictions while under the care of doctors they trusted make the Insys narrative quite terrible in the end. Yates aimed for a drastically different vibe for the film, one that would both amuse and inform audiences.
“We always felt we wanted it to be as subversive and as naughty and as different as we could be compared to those,” Yates told Time. The primary goal was to educate the public about the opioid pandemic.
We wanted it to be wild, chaotic, and entertaining,” he said. We wanted the plot to have some serious emotional weight by the conclusion.
And Pain Hustlers shrank its universe for the sake of concentrated character growth. The movie takes place in Florida, where there were probably Insys sales personnel, but the company had offices and representatives across the United States.
Is John Kapoor a Real Person?
John Kapoor actually existed, you know. Forbes claims that he was born in India and received a full scholarship to attend an American university. Kapoor created a pain relief spray called Subsys that included fentanyl.
While the drug’s approval was tied to its use in relieving severe pain for cancer patients, Kapoor organized a group to bribe doctors into giving it to people for whom it wasn’t actually essential.
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