The company behind America’s most popular drug to treat addicts actually claimed its pills could kill kids to get a new patent and $1 billion.
In 2009, with opioid-painkiller deaths at an all time high in America, a British consumer goods company you’ve probably never heard of was facing a crisis of its own.
That year, Reckitt Benckiser’s patent for its opiate-treatment drug Suboxone expired, opening the gates for cheaper generic versions of the medication to hit the market. At stake was the loss of the company’s 85 percent hold on the market for medication-assisted treatment, which was booming thanks to the growing opiate epidemic. Hundreds of millions stood to be lost from the patent’s expiration.
According to a massive antitrust lawsuit made public last week, that’s when Reckitt Benckiser decided to destroy the Suboxone market in order to keep it.
Thirty-five states and the District of Columbia are named as plaintiffs in the suit, which was filed under seal in federal court in Philadelphia on Sept. 23.
A copy of the 92-page, partially redacted complaint describes how the company, spin-off company Indivior, and a third company called MonoSol RX gamed the pharmaceutical regulatory process using a variety of “deceptive and unconscionable” practices to maintain a chokehold on the emerging market for medicine-based addiction treatment.
The case against Reckitt Benckiser accuses it of “product hopping,” in which a company tweaks its product slightly, often without any actual improvements, and then applies for a new patent with the intent of keeping its market share intact. In Reckitt Benckiser’s case, the product switch was from the orange Suboxone tablets it had been successfully marketing to a new dissolvable film strip that was developed by co-defendant MonoSol RX.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit say Reckitt Benckiser took product hopping to a nefarious new level by using “feared-based messaging” and “sham science” to illegally subvert the market for Suboxone tablets while aggressively promoting its new film variation, which was introduced in 2010 and is under patent until 2023.
“The circumstances alleged in this case are particularly egregious in that, in the midst of an epidemic of opioid abuse and addiction… consumers and taxpayers have had to pay more for a drug that may help to mitigate some of the problem,” said George Jepsen, the attorney general of Connecticut, in a statement announcing the suit.
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