Using Doctors With Troubled Pasts to Market a Painkiller

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Dr. Judson Somerville, a pain specialist in Laredo, Tex., received $67,000 in speaking fees, travel and meals in 2013 to promote a powerful and addictive painkiller called Subsys, according to a new federal database of payments that drug companies make to physicians.

But while Insys Therapeutics, the Arizona company that makes the product, was paying Dr. Somerville to promote it, he was under investigation by the Texas Medical Board. Last December, the board ordered him to stop prescribing painkillers after it found that he had authorized employees to hand out pre-signed prescriptions to patients and after it learned that three of his patients had died in 2012 of drug overdoses, most likely from drugs that he had prescribed.

Dr. Somerville, who received more money from Insys than any other doctor between August and December 2013, is just one of the company’s highly paid doctors who have recently faced legal...

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URL: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/28/business/drug-maker-gave-large-payments-to-doctors-with-troubled-track-records.html