Andy Garcia’s ‘Pain Hustlers’ Character Is Based on This Man

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Pain Hustlers is the latest piece of media to mine drama from the opioid crisis, skewering the pharmaceutical industry and the unscrupulous individuals who profited from pushing highly addictive drugs into the marketplace, leading to thousands of avoidable overdose-related deaths. While previous series Painkiller and Dopesick took aim at the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma, Pain Hustlers—now streaming on Netflix—focuses on another company's role in the epidemic.

In the movie, we follow down-on-her-luck Liza Drake (Emily Blunt) as she takes a job at a drug company called Zanna, whose shady business practices soon start to make a lot of money—but at a grave human cost.

Pain Hustlers is based on the work of journalist and author Evan Hughes, who broke the story of pharmaceutical company Insys and its kickback scheme which incentivized doctors to recommend the fentanyl-based drug Subsys to other prescribers. The Zanna of the movie, and its drug Lorafen, are thinly-veiled analogues of Insys and Subsys.

Many of the Zanna employees in the film, including Emily Blunt's protagonist Liza Drake, are fictional composites who were inspired by a wide array of real people who were involved with Insys and interviewed by Pain Hustlers author Evan Hughes.

"This isn’t the Insys story in detail at all," director David Yates told EW. "It's inspired by that—the fringes of that industry and how they exploit one very marginal sector of the healthcare industry and make a fortune out of it."

However, there are a couple of instances where you can draw a direct parallel between the real figures in the scandal and characters depicted in the movie. For instance, Chris Evans' character Pete Brenner is likely a fictionalized version of sales manager Alec Burlakoff, a major figure in Hughes' exposé on Insys.

And Andy Garcia's character, eccentric Zanna head Jack Neel, is clearly a dramatized version of real-life Insys founder John Kapoor.

Who is John Kapoor?

Kapoor founded Insys Therapeutics in 1990, and developd Subsys, a fentanyl-based pain treatment which was 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin.

He hired several of the executives in his company who were later embroiled in the scandal and accused of bribing prescribers to push Subsys on patients. This was achieved via "speaker programs" where physicians would advocate for the benefits of Subsys (and were paid generously to do so), while downplaying its addictive properties.

Where is John Kapoor now?

Kapoor, along with several of his co-conspirators, faced legal action for the kickback scheme. Kapoor was arrested in 2017 and charged with fraud and racketeering. In 2020, he was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in prison and three years of supervised release, in addition to a $250,000 fine.

However, Kapoor only ended up serving two years of his sentence: he was released in 2023 and ordered to repay $6 million in legal fees.

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