Reckitt Benckiser is to voluntarily stop selling its lucrative heroin replacement tablets in the US after receiving a study it said found that the pills were more likely to be accidentally taken by young children than alternative treatments.
The group is best known for its household cleaning brands such as Dettol, Finish, and Air Wick, but it makes more than 20% of its operating profit from a lucrative legacy pharmaceuticals business which sells the heroin replacement drug suboxone under licence from the US Food and Drug Administration.
The company said it would encourage American doctors to migrate recovering heroin addicts on to another, newer Reckitt product, which delivers the same suboxone drug via an under-the-tongue film. Reckitt said the alternative product was "child resistant", in part because of its packaging, which allows access one dose at a time. Suboxone tablets are sold in a bottle which contains 30 pills.
The FDA has not ordered Reckitt to stop supplying tablets but the company said it felt compelled to act after seeing analysis from the US Poison Control Centres this month which showed that rates of "accidental unsupervised paediatric exposure" to suboxone was about eight times higher with tablets than with film.
A spokesman for the company said the decision had nothing to do with the fact that Reckitt's film product was patent-protected while the group's suboxone tablets business is shortly expected to face competition from cheap, copycat generic drug suppliers.
Reckitt investors have been closely watching suboxone sales in recent years after the drug lost its exclusive marketing rights in October 2009. The company had warned investors to expect generic competitor pills to be available at some stage. In its annual report Reckitt said: "Up to 80% of the revenue and profit from the suboxone tablet business in the US might be lost in the year following the launch of generic competitors, with the possibility of further erosion thereafter."
