Prison time for Insys bosses puts opioid maker on notice

Fascinating story, though I'm particularly drawn to the sidebar commentary:

John Kapoor insisted that Insys hire sales representatives who were “PHD” — “poor, hungry, driven” or “poor, hungry, dumb”— Alec Burlakoff told the FT and Frontline.

This is how you create drug pushers (criminal or corporate), corporate fraudsters, "just following orders" rank-and-file within atrocity-committing organisatios (government, corporate, criminal, social), propagandists, and quite often within academic disciplines.

I'm reminded of a professor I'd had in an introductory social sciences course. On their death, I learned that far from the patrician presence he'd come to be when I knew him, he'd come from humble and harsh beginnings, as related in an obituary. Though they'd published little academic work, they were able to make a substantial endowment to the university. It also became clear to me over the decades, substantiated by the fact that virtually all their published work was via specifically ideological (and corporate-backed) insitutions, that he was ragingly partisan. A realisation which explained much of his lecture and course presentation and materials.

That personal history matches others in the field.

A background of poverty can be illuminating and character-building. It can also be the opposite. It is a tool which creates individuals who, as the Insys quote demonstrates, manipulators and destroyers of the common weal can, will and do, with all deliberate intent exploit.

Poverty and inequality are a self-feeding cycle.