The decision – one is tempted to say the pill – is a bitter one for the victims. On 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 opioid scandal in the United States, and its creditors. This decision means that Mallinckrodt does not have to pay over half of the compensation it was supposed to pay into a fund for victims of a public health crisis that has claimed the lives of more than 600,000 Americans over 20 years.

Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals is less well known than Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family company that became the emblem of the scandal. Mallinckrodt nonetheless played a crucial role in the expansion of the use of opioid painkillers (such as oxycodone) from the late 1990s onwards.

The proliferation of prescriptions by doctors convinced by manufacturers that the drug was only minimally addictive was followed by an epidemic of overdoses from which the US has yet to recover. Trafficking in the synthetic opioid fentanyl, channeled through Latin American drug cartels, replaced legal prescriptions. Since 2015, life expectancy has fallen in the United States, due in particular to the explosion in opioid-related deaths.

For years, Mallinckrodt, which manufactures its products in the US but is domiciled in Ireland, marketed the drug Roxicodone, one of the most widely used painkillers, and the generic drug Hydrocodone. Its marketing to prescribers proved 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.

In response to over 3,000 complaints alleging the concealment of their drugs' addictive properties, Mallinckrodt was compelled to agree to a restructuring plan in June 2022, committing to pay $1.7 billion (€1.6 billion) over eight years to affected state and local governments for supporting rehabilitation programs and compensating the thousands of complainants.

Within a year, the company could only muster a $200 million contribution, and even after a debt-reducing settlement of $1.5 billion, Mallinckrodt faced renewed financial troubles, leading to its announcement in late August 2023 of its intention to file for bankruptcy, marking its second bankruptcy in three years. The pharmaceuticals group was caught between falling sales (20% less in the first half of the year for one of its flagship products, Acthar gel, prescribed for multiple sclerosis) and rising debt costs, due to rising interest rates.

You have 43.86% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.