Pain Hustlers: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup Originally published as The Hard Sell

by Evan Hughes

A speaker program is a widely used promotional tool in the pharmaceutical industry. Drug companies pay doctors to give talks about the benefits of their product to other potential prescribers. The sales rep assigned to the doctor helps set up the event and attends it. These are not generally speeches with a lectern and microphone in a hotel banquet room. Usually they are relatively small gatherings, with perhaps four to twelve attendees in addition to the speaker and the sales rep. The talks take place at a clinic or, more often, over dinner in a private room at a restaurant. The speaker is trained in advance and uses a slide deck created by the drug company to make the presentations, usually on an ongoing basis; the doctor signs a contract and joins the drugmaker’s “speaker bureau.”