The New Hampshire Attorney General’s office has joined 41 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit against the makers of Suboxone, a prescription drug used to treat opioid addiction.
Vermont joined the lawsuit in September.
The antitrust lawsuit accuses Reckitt Benckiser Pharmaceuticals, now known as Indivior, of conspiring with another company to switch Suboxone from a tablet to a dissolvable strip to thwart cheaper generics and hold a monopoly on the drug’s profits.
By doing so, the companies are violating state and federal antitrust laws, and making consumers and purchasers pay artificially high prices for the drug, the suit alleges.
“It’s obviously a significant matter, given the opioid crisis in the state,” said Assistant Attorney General James Boffetti, who heads up the state’s consumer protection bureau.
By shutting out generics, Reckitt made Suboxone prohibitively expensive for the people who needed it most, Boffetti said.
“You make it unaffordable for some people or unavailable for some people,” he said.
Annual Suboxone sales have topped $1 billion since 2009, according to the lawsuit.
The demand for the drug has shot up in recent years, as drug dependence has been on the rise. Suboxone is widely regarded by addiction medicine specialists as one of the most important tools to fight heroin and opioid addiction. The dissolvable strip is itself an opioid that eases cravings for drugs, while staving off withdrawal symptoms.
Federal and state health officials have encouraged getting more doctors certified to prescribe it, given the seriousness of the drug crisis.
Over 430 New Hampshire died of drug overdoses last year, and the state is on track to surpass 500 deaths in 2016, according to the New Hampshire Medical Examiner.
Suboxone and other maintenance drugs like methadone and naltrexone were recently given a big boost by U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.
In a report released on Thursday, Murthy came out strongly against “a longstanding misconception” that medically-assisted treatments for addiction like methadone and buprenorphine “substitute one addiction for another.”
“This belief has reinforced scientifically unsound ‘abstinence-only’ philosophies in many treatment centers and has severely limited the use of these medications,” the report stated.
The lawsuit states that when Reckitt introduced the tablet form of Suboxone in 2002, it had exclusivity protection for seven years, barring generic versions of the drug from being developed in that time.
Before that seven-year period was up, Reckitt worked with pharmaceutical company MonoSol Rx to created the dissolvable strip form of the drug – at the same time marketing the strip to move consumers away from Suboxone in pill form, the suit alleges.
The suit calls this illegal “product hopping,” where a company slightly changes its product to block other companies from introducing cheaper generic versions of the drug.
Furthermore, Reckitt kept selling Suboxone in pill form in other countries after removing them from the U.S. market. The company also intentionally delayed FDA approval of generic versions of Suboxone, according to the suit.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern Division of Pennsylvania and led by the State of Wisconsin.
States are asking the court to restore competition and order appropriate relief for consumers.
The N.H. Attorney General decided to join the lawsuit a few weeks ago after talking to other states suing Reckitt, but made the announcement official on Thursday, Boffetti said.