CNNCLEVELAND, Ohio - In 20 years, drug manufacturers, distributors, pharmacies and practitioners acted as street drug couriers and shipped "hundreds of millions" of suspicious opioid doses into two Ohio counties, according to a motion filed in the US District Court in the Northern District of Ohio.
The suspicious order systemTo catch suspicious orders, companies are required to design a "Suspicious Order Monitoring" system, which the more than 400 defendants in this case failed to create, the attorneys allege in the court documents.
The defendants are also charged with "turning a blind eye" to suspicious pharmaceutical orders that allowed the two counties to be flooded with opioids, as they didn't report suspicious orders to the DEA and shipped orders that were or should have been flagged as suspicious.
"Their failure to identify suspicious orders was their business model: they turned a blind eye and called themselves mere "deliverymen" with no responsibility for what they delivered or to whom.
Mallinckrodt shipped more than 53 million orders of opioid products between 2003 and 2011, marked 38,000 orders as potentially suspicious, but only stopped and reported 33, the filing alleges.