Shame on the Sun Times for publishing a fake news story like this

Archdiocese opposes legal pot — so does drug firm where top church executive works and the SunTimes opposes the Catholic Church as they try to create a nexus where it does not exist. 

Betsy Bohlen received $145,000 in compensation while on the board of Insys Therapeutics, an embattled pharmaceutical company that has said legal marijuana could hurt its profits.
By Tom Schuba May 20, 2019, 5:00am CDT
SHARE
Betsy Bohlen (upper right) is chief operating officer for the Archdiocese of Chicago and also a board member for Insys, a company whose aggressive marketing of Subsys, an opioid, has led to criminal charges against its founder.Sun-Times file photos
In February, the Archdiocese of Chicago and its leader, Cardinal Blase Cupich, joined Illinois’ five other Roman Catholic bishops in coming out strongly against efforts to legalize recreational marijuana in the state. The Sun Times is suggesting that these six bishops were motivated by a desire to shore up the profits at Insys. Instead they were taking a position in opposition to the legalization of marijuana because they believe marijuana is harmful. 
At the same time, one of the archdiocese’s top lay officials, Chief Operating Officer Betsy Bohlen, was receiving compensation worth more than $145,000 to serve on the board of directors for Insys Therapeutics, an embattled Arizona-based drug company that has also opposed marijuana legalization and whose founder and former executives were recently found guilty of bribing doctors to prescribe a dangerous opioid drug.

Insys — which is now developing prescription drugs made from synthetic versions of compounds commonly found in marijuana — has acknowledged that marijuana legalization could hurt its bottom line, and even poured $500,000 into the campaign that stopped legalization in Arizona in 2016. The success or failure of legalization in Illinois and nationwide could end up impacting Bohlen’s compensation, the vast majority of which is made up of stock awards and options to buy stock in the company.

The archdiocese denied that Bohlen’s work for Insys and the archdiocese posed a conflict.

”We do not see any conflict of interest in Betsy Bohlen’s role in helping INSYS recover from a troubled history and bring products to market to serve the unmet needs of patients,” the archdiocese said in a statement.

Bohlen, a former management consultant at a top consulting firm, McKinsey & Company, declined to comment beyond a brief written statement.

“My prior professional experience has enabled me to manage the operations of the archdiocese and to contribute on a corporate board such as INSYS,” Bohlen said in the statement. “I joined the INSYS board for the promise of helping it transition from a difficult past to help patients with promising new technologies.”