American Cyanamid - Legal Issues

Legal Issues

Cyanamid was for some time listed in various editions of the Guinness Book of World Records as the victim of the largest industrial theft in history. Cyanamid maintained a (legal, patent-protected) monopoly on tetracycline for some years. However, a visitor to the facility where tetracycline was fermented was able to scoop up a small amount of the mix containing the tetracycline organism, thus to propagate it in outside facilities and produce a generic version of the antibiotic – breaking Cyanamid's monopoly, which eventually cost Cyanamid hundreds of millions of dollars in sales as other producers entered the business.

In its later life, the company frequently brushed up against the law for its earlier environmental abuses (which were legal when they occurred). During the 1970s, tens of millions of dollars were spent on effluent treatment – such as a $15 million tertiary water treatment plant in Bound Brook, NJ, which returned water to the Raritan River that was cleaner than the river itself. Tens of millions more were spent in efforts to clean up large wastewater pools, which had decades of accumulation of toxic, carcinogenic, and teratogenic chemicals. These are considered by the EPA to be among the most toxic chemical waste sites in the USA. In the end, Cyanamid abandoned a number of hazardous waste sites to the government, notably the Bound Brook and Bridgewater sites in New Jersey.

The 575-acre Superfund site at Bridgewater became flooded during Hurricane Irene in 2011, with consequent leakage of benzene and numerous other chemicals into the Raritan River and adjacent land, apparently including residential sites. Subsequent testing showed no evident danger to humans, but the calamity intensified the extensive cleanup work already underway.

The company was involved in a well-known legal case in the United Kingdom which set the test for interim injunctions in England and Wales and set down what became known to lawyers as the "American Cyanamid" rules.