Drugmakers knew tamper-resistant painkillers could be abused: lawsuit

A new court filing accuses drug manufacturers of promoting painkillers they said were resistant to tampering by drug abusers even though the companies knew that those protections did not work.

The claims were filed Thursday, the same day that drug manufacturer Endo Pharmaceuticals agreed to withdraw its opioid painkiller Opana ER from the market in a dispute over its 'abuse deterrent” formulation.

The Food and Drug Administration last month asked Endo to remove the medication from the market, the first time the agency had done so because of the public health consequences of abuse.

The company reformulated the extended release drug in 2012 to make it more difficult for abusers to crush and snort. But the FDA said the reformulation led to more people injecting the drug and sparked a major 2015 outbreak of HIV and hepatitis C in a small Indiana county among users who shared needles.

The Dublin-based company said in a statement on its website that it 'continues to believe in the safety, efficacy and favorable benefit-risk profile” of the drug but would comply with the FDA's request. The move will cost Endo $20 million, the company said.

Sales of the drug totaled $159 million last year, Endo said.

The new legal claims against Endo and another drug company, Purdue Pharma, were added to lawsuits first filed in 2014 by two counties in California. The lawsuits were some of the first in a growing wave of legal actions against drug manufacturers, distributors and retailers. The lawsuits, filed by states, counties and cities across the country, seek to make the drug industry pay for the costs of addressing the opioid epidemic.

Nearly 180,000 people died of overdoses of prescription narcotics between 2000 and 2015, and thousands more have succumbed to heroin and fentanyl as the crisis has evolved.