A drugmaker fueled Florida's opioid epidemic with a flood of oxycodone. It's balking at paying.
Mallinckrodt said it is exploring "alternatives" to paying this month's installment on a $1.6 billion settlement stemming from oxycodone sales
In 2009, the little pharmacy off Lucerne Avenue in Lake Worth had a drug problem.
Posted signs warned that sales of oxycodone would be limited. But that did not stop groups of young, thin, tattooed customers from lining up to pick up pills, an executive with an independent drug distributor found.
And it did not stop the pharmacy from filling the prescriptions: In December 2008 alone, DEA documents show it doled out 192,000 doses of oxycodone 30 mg, the dosage preferred by traffickers and users alike.
Even the manufacturer of the pills was worried about the sales volume, according to DEA records: Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals.
Eight years later, the DEA had a different take on Mallinckrodt’s role in flooding Florida with oxycodone.
The agency accused Mallinckrodt of knowing that its oxycodone 30 mg and 15 mg tablets were part of an “epidemic” increase of oxycodone purchased in Florida and spreading through the country.
But instead of hitting the brakes, Mallinckrodt stepped on the gas.
In 2020, Mallinckrodt agreed to a $1.6 billion settlement of thousands of claims stemming from its role in fueling the opioid epidemic.
Now it is balking at making this month’s scheduled $200 million payment.
The company submitted a Securities and Exchange Commission filing stating that creditors objected to the payment and that Mallinckrodt was looking at “alternatives” to the “payment structure.”
Managers overseeing distribution of the settlement have responded by “threatening action against the company, its officers and directors,” Mallinckrodt’s filing acknowledged.
It's not known how much, if any, of the $1.6 billion Florida would share with other states — or how much Florida and its counties, cities and towns stand to lose if the company does not honor the agreement.
Attorney General Ashley Moody’s office, which has overseen settlements with seven other opioid manufacturers and distributors, refused to comment on Mallinckrodt.
An unfamiliar name
Purdue Pharma was the first and remains the best known of drug manufacturers that manipulated science and scientists, turned medicine on its head and cultivated the opioid addiction that would lead to heroin and now, fentanyl.
By contrast, Mallinckrodt plc reads almost like an afterthought in the lineup of corporate defendants sued by Florida and other cities and states across the country.
Its unwieldy name is not synonymous with a medical school in New York or a wing of Paris’ Louvre museum, as Purdue’s was.
But Mallinckrodt was never just a footnote to the oxycodone epidemic that burned its way through Florida and Palm Beach County.
Half a billion of Mallinckrodt’s oxycodone pills flooded into Florida in just four years, an analysis by The Washington Post found; 66 percent of all oxycodone sold in the state between 2008 and 2012.
To make sure doctors prescribed its drugs, Mallinckrodt broke out the corporate checkbook. In a lawsuit naming Mallinckrodt and other companies, the city of Delray Beach said that from 2013 through 2016, Mallinckrodt paid more than $110,400 to Delray Beach physicians for consulting, speakers’ bureau participation and more.
A flood of pills and a fine
Mallinckrodt could flood Florida with addictive opioids because for 10 years, state lawmakers refused to crack down on the booming pain clinic industry or monitor the opioids they prescribed and sold.
Emboldened by the indifference, “pill mills” in Palm Beach and Broward counties in particular thrived.
And Florida-bought pills landed everywhere.
They were driven out of state on a notorious stretch of interstate dubbed the Oxy Express after Purdue’s OxyContin. Florida oxy showed up in Salt Lake City, Seattle, Alaska.
Van loads of “VIP buyers” traveled from Ohio to Jacksonville, where armed guards handled crowd control and doctors prescribed 3.2 million pills in six months. But Southeast Florida was “the wild west of oxycodone prescribing,” a horrified Ohio drug distributor visiting Broward wrote.
At the Lake Worth pharmacy, the pharmacist enthusiastically reported they were courting local pain clinics’ business, federal records show.
The unidentified pharmacist then complained about government restrictions on how many addictive pills he could buy.
In 2017, almost a decade after it raised concerns about sales of oxycodone at that pharmacy, Mallinckrodt paid $35 million to settle DEA allegations tied to excessive oxycodone sales.
By then, the company stated, it had already implemented safeguards.
But by then, it was too late for many in Palm Beach County.
When Florida finally did crack down and pain clinics began shuttering, people who could no longer get prescription oxycodone turned to the next best thing: heroin.
The butcher’s bill
In 2015, more than 200 people died from a heroin-related overdose in Palm Beach County, The Palm Beach Post reported. The death toll started rising as soon as the state started cracking down on opioid prescriptions.
Jody Barnes, who had been prescribed painkillers for a head injury, died after taking heroin at her Palm Beach County home. So did Chris Evans, who had been prescribed pain pills for arthritis. Jordan Graves’ prescription painkiller addiction dated to her mid-teens; heroin claimed her at 32
Tate Lindsey Jr. was 19 when he was prescribed painkillers after a 300-pound steel door fell on him; he used heroin and died walking out of a friend’s house. He was 27.
And Randy Baynes died on a bench in front of Lake Worth Beach City Hall, a stone’s throw from the now-closed pharmacy that had courted pain clinic clients seeking oxycodone.
In 2016, Delray Beach paramedics responded to 748 overdose calls. Police there saw so many dead that city officials began providing mental health support.
In 2017, Delray Beach sued: Not just Purdue and Mallinckrodt, but a cluster of distributors and pharmacy chains.
Hundreds, then thousands of near-identical suits were filed across the country before being consolidated.
Billion-dollar settlements have been struck. Deals with seven companies alone — Johnson & Johnson, Endo Health Solutions, CVS Health Corp., Teva Pharmaceuticals, Allergan Finance, Walgreen Co. and Walmart — will provide Florida as much as $1.9 billion, according to data provided by the Florida attorney general.
Hundreds of millions will be divided among counties and towns to combat addiction and curb the newest opioid in the continuing epidemic: fentanyl, and increasingly, its variations.
But while fentanyl dominates the death statistics, the others have never gone away.
Heroin killed more people in Palm Beach County in 2021 than in any other place in Florida, according to an annual state medical examiners. And oxycodone continues to claim lives here, too, years after the last pill mill was finally shuttered.
Pat dug deep into the heroin epidemic, anchoring The Palm Beach Post’s coverage beginning in 2016. You can read some of the award-winning coverage of Florida’s role in igniting the heroin epidemic, here.
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