AG: Data reveals how company flooded Kentucky with opioids

FRANKFORT, Ky. (WTVQ) – A judge has agreed with a request from the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office to unseal court documents that reveal specific data on how one opioid manufacturer flooded Kentucky with opioids, according to the AG’s Office.

The AG’s Office filed a motion in Madison Circuit Court in August to unseal previously redacted information in a complaint against Missouri-based manufacturer Mallinckrodt. A judge entered the order this week.

The information was originally sealed to comply with subpoena procedure employed in the investigation and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration database, which was released to the public this summer following a federal opioid case in Ohio.

Previously redacted information in the complaint, now available after the filing, according to the AG’s Office, includes:

• From January 2012 to December 2017, Mallinckrodt sold 896,167,221 dosage units of opioids in Kentucky.
• Internal documents demonstrate that Mallinckrodt was aware of suspicious orders in Kentucky, but continued to fill orders of opioids for pharmacies. For instance, a Manchester pharmacy dispensed 9,533, 30 mg tablets of oxycodone each month in 2012. Manchester’s population in 2012 was just 1,434 people.
• From April 2010 to May 2014, Mallinckrodt sales representatives visited and called Kentucky prescribers 17,492 times in order to promote its painkiller, Exalgo.
• From 2006 to 2014, Mallinckrodt sold 21% of opioids by gram weight distributed to Kentucky pharmacies and accounted for 29.66% of total opioid orders in the Commonwealth during that time.
• Kentucky’s Medicaid program spent $14,793,690 on Mallinckrodt’s opioids from 2013 to 2016. 

  Kentucky leads the nation with nine individual opioid lawsuits.