Alec Burlakoff: From Guidance Counselor to $3 Billion Big Pharma Sales

From Guidance Counselor to $3 Billion in Sales

When I talked with Alec Burlakoff, the former senior VP at Insys Pharmaceuticals who helped generate over three billion dollars in sales before landing in federal prison, I expected to hear about greed and corruption. What I got instead was the story of a guidance counselor who watched a guy in a Bentley blow cigar smoke in his face and decided he was done being on the wrong side of money.

Alec’s path to becoming one of the most successful pharmaceutical executives in history started about as far from sales as you can get. He had a master’s in child psychology and was working as a guidance counselor at an affluent private school in Florida. His dad and brother were in sales, but Alec had gone the opposite direction. “I loathed it,” he told me. “I thought it sounded like hell.”

But being around all that money at the private school started getting to him. The final straw came during carpool duty. “I had to monitor the carpool lane after school and we had a guy smoking a cigar and a Bentley convertible. I went out there and said hey would you mind kindly putting the cigar out. He took another puff, blew it in my face and said ‘Petty rules from Petty people,’” Alec said.

That moment changed everything.

The Sickness That Shaped Everything

Before we get to how Alec became a pharmaceutical kingpin, you need to understand what happened to him in high school. The summer before his senior year, he got hit with a rare bacterial infection called brucellosis. “It’s the worst flu you ever had but it never ends,” he described. “Day after day, a week, a month, sweats, chills, nausea, you’re losing weight.”

He was the first case diagnosed in 20 years. His entire senior year was shot. He was on homebound instruction, didn’t even go to school. The experience taught him he wasn’t invincible and gave him his first taste of depression. But it also shaped how he thought about healthcare and pharmaceuticals from the patient side.

Building a Different Kind of Sales Team

When Alec finally made the jump to pharmaceutical sales with Eli Lilly, he became Rookie of the Year right out of the gate. But it was later, at Insys, where he really made his mark by throwing out every traditional hiring rule in the book.

“It annoyed the hell out of me that people in Pharmaceuticals seem to have their nose up in the air because they had this college degree,” he said. So when he started building his team at Insys, he hired based on one criterion: could they sell? College degree optional.

He hired an ex-felon. He hired a stripper he met while entertaining physicians at a strip club. When HR questioned the no-degree policy, his response was direct: “Who said you need a college degree to sell?”

The results spoke for themselves. Sales exploded.

The Speakers Bureau That Crossed Every Line

At the heart of Insys’s massive sales growth was what they called a speakers bureau, but it wasn’t really about speaking. It was about paying doctors to prescribe their powerful opioid, Subsys, through fake speaker fees.

Finding the right doctors wasn’t easy. “We uncovered every stone, went to every city, cities that you’ve never even heard of in the middle of nowhere,” Alec explained. They used prescription data to profile doctors who were already prescribing lots of pain medication. They looked for divorce doctors trying to hide money, introverts who never went out but might be tempted by VIP treatment and bottle service.

Even then, most doctors said no. “Maybe less than one out of ten would agree to that,” Alec said. But the ones who did agree helped drive billions in sales.

They targeted primary care physicians making around $150,000 a year because adding another $200,000 in speaker fees could change their lifestyle. Specialists making much more weren’t interested.

When the Walls Started Closing In

Alec knew trouble was coming before the FBI knocked on doors. An investigative reporter had started writing pieces about Insys. Doctors were getting arrested for overprescribing. Patients were dying.

“I felt it,” he said. “I had to feel it.” But he kept telling himself this was just part of pharmaceutical sales, that these things were commonplace. He didn’t know at the time that they would become the first pharmaceutical executives ever sent to prison for their sales practices.

When his civil attorney called to say he couldn’t represent him anymore because the investigation had gone criminal, Alec was in California on business. “Once you’re a subject, you’re pretty much a target,” he realized. “Once indicted, you are cooked.”

Prison During COVID

Alec served his time during COVID, which added another layer of difficulty to an already brutal experience. Prison freedoms are limited to begin with, but when they take away even those small liberties, “it gets really small,” as Alec and I discussed before our conversation.

Coming out of prison changed his perspective completely. “There’s a liberating feeling as I can do that, if I can do that I can pretty much do anything,” he reflected. “I might be a little bit scared of what you’re presenting me but I know I can do it because I’ve adapted to pretty much anything.”

Now he’s focused on speaking at colleges and universities, sharing his story as a cautionary tale. It gives him some of the same satisfaction he felt as a CEO, but without the devastating consequences.

The Netflix movie “Pain Hustlers” tells a version of his story, and his book “Selling Pain” dives deep into what really happened at Insys. But talking with Alec, what comes through isn’t just the story of corporate greed. It’s the story of someone who climbed as high as you can climb in pharmaceutical sales, only to discover that sometimes the biggest nightmare isn’t failing to reach your goals. Sometimes it’s what happens after you achieve them.