'Pain Hustlers' Is (Somewhat) Based on a True Story
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The opioid crisis has become the most popular inspiration for crime dramas this year. After Hulu aired the successful Dopesick miniseries back in 2021, Netflix has since prescribed viewers Painkiller, The Fall of the House of the Usher, and now, Pain Hustlers. The new dark comedy—which starring Emily Blunt and Chris Evans—is a bit different than the infamous Sackler family debacle, but there's a lot of shared history.
In many ways, Pain Hustlers is another tale of a company that undersold the addictive nature of their painkillers. Though Hustlers is a bit more comedic than its predecessors, it essentially follows the same angle. Still, its filmmakers took some important creative liberties in the process. The pharmaceutical scandal that plays out in the new film didn't occur exactly as it did in real life, meaning viewers may find it helpful to distinguish just what really happened.
Is Pain Hustlers Based on a Real Scandal?
Yes. A fentanyl-based drug company did face consequences in real life for peddling through "speaker programs." The film was inspired by a 2018 New York Times Magazine article that writer Evan Hughes later turned into a nonfiction book titled Pain Hustlers. Both works detailed a start-up pharmaceutical company named Insys that marketed a fentanyl spray for the management of pain. Hughes's reporting also included how Insys sold the drug, including the practice of hiring attractive sales reps and bribing medical practitioners.
The company was founded by billionaire Dr. John Kapoor, who was most likely the inspiration for Jack Neel (Andy Garcia) in the new Netflix film. Though Pain Hustlers remains a highly fictionalized work, many of the characters share similar roles in the story to their real-life counterparts. Liza Drake (Emily Blunt) is a composite character that takes on many characters from the original article. So is Pete Brennar (Chris Evans), who most resembles real-life sales manager Alec Burlakoff. Insys and its drug, Subsys, were also renamed. In Pain Hustlers, a company named Zanna peddles a drug called Lonafen. (You can read more about Lonafen's real-life inspiration here.)
How Do the Stories Differ?
Since Liza isn't a real character in the original article, director David Yates buffed up her story by giving her a daughter. A major plot point in Pain Hustlers is that Liza's daughter suffers from a brain tumor, which complicates her connection to the drug company. Liza is also given a mother, played by Catherine O’Hara, who becomes a sales rep as well.
"I’ve always been fascinated by salespeople and what they do and the moral side of the pharma industry when they’re hustling to make money," Yates told Entertainment Weekly. "Elements of the story are obviously consistent to what Evan Hughes documented in his book, but we created Liza Drake, we created the relationship she has with her daughter, Phoebe, just as a way of allowing the audience to connect with a single character and carry us through the story."
Do the Stories Have Similar Endings?
Thankfully, the real-life story of Insys ends in a similar downfall. In 2019, Dr. Kapoor was convicted by a federal jury for engaging in a racketeering conspiracy. He was sentenced to over five years in prison and the company was ordered to settle for $225 million. Insys later went bankrupt, and Kapoor was released after serving just two and a half years of his sentence. Federal prosecutors allegedly asked for 15 years. According to Reuters, Kapoor was the "highest-level corporate executive convicted at trial of crimes related to the opioid epidemic."
The company's speaker programs and parody raps were also surprisingly based on real-life tactics used by Insys, which The Guardian described as "educational seminars" held at bars and strip clubs. Though similar, Yates still told EW that Pain Hustlers isn't meant to be "the Insys story" in full. "It’s inspired by that," he explained, "the fringes of that industry and how they exploit one very marginal sector of the healthcare industry and make a fortune out of it." Writer Evan Hughes also stated in an interview with Time that, "even if the details come from hither and yon, they're real."
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