The decision – one would be tempted to say the pill – is bitter for the victims. Tuesday, October 10, Delaware federal judge John Dorsey validated the agreement reached in August between the pharmaceutical company Mallinckrodt, one of the defendants in the resounding opioid scandal in the United States, and its creditors. This decision will allow the laboratory to escape more than half of the compensation it was supposed to pay to the compensation fund for victims of a public health crisis which has claimed more than 600,000 Americans in twenty years.
Less well known than Purdue Pharma, the Sackler family company that became the symbol of scandal, Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals nevertheless played a crucial role in the expansion of the use of opiate painkillers (such as oxycodone) from the end of the 1990s.
The multiplication of prescriptions by doctors convinced by the manufacturers that the drug caused only minimal addiction was followed by an epidemic of overdoses from which the United States has still not emerged, the trafficking of the synthetic opioid fentanyl, transported by Latin American drug cartels, having replaced legal prescriptions. Since 2015, life expectancy has fallen in the United States, notably due to the explosion of deaths linked to opiates.
Aggressive marketing
For years, Mallinckrodt, which manufactures its products in the United States but is domiciled in Ireland, marketed the drug Roxicodone, one of the most widely used painkillers, and the generic Hydrocodone. Its marketing to prescribers was just as aggressive as Purdue’s, according to documents that were made public in October 2020, when the laboratory filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Targeted by more than three thousand complaints accusing it of having hidden the addictive power of its drugs, Mallinckrodt was forced to accept, in June 2022, a restructuring plan providing for the payment of a sum of 1.7 billion dollars (1.6 billion euros) in eight years to injured state and local governments, to finance their drug treatment programs, as well as to thousands of plaintiffs.
In one year, the laboratory only managed to pay a contribution of 200 million dollars. Despite a settlement reducing its debt by $1.5 billion, Mallinckrodt found itself in difficulty again and was forced to announce, at the end of August 2023, that it intended to declare itself bankrupt once again, the second time in three years. . The laboratory is caught between a drop in sales (20% less in the first half for one of its flagship products, Acthar gel, prescribed against multiple sclerosis) and the increase in the cost of its debt, caused by rising interest rates.
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