A small California-based company called Zogenix purchased the right to market Zohydro in the United States from another drug maker, Elan. Then a year later, in 2011, Alkermes bought a unit of Elan that included Zohydro, among other products, and inherited the existing agreement with Zogenix.

In their presentation to the F.D.A., officials of Zogenix said they would closely monitor the drug’s use for signs that it was being abused and quickly move to stop such problems. Agency officials said they had approved the drug to give doctors another long-acting opioid to use when treating patients with chronic pain.

A few days after the drug’s approval, Zogenix announced that it had signed an agreement with another company, Altus Formulation, under which Altus would develop a formulation of Zohydro that was less vulnerable to abuse than the one just approved.

The development of drug formulations that are less prone to abuse can take years and are not always successful. Currently, drugs like OxyContin are designed so their consistency changes when they are crushed, making them difficult to inject or snort.

Zogenix began running a clinical trial of Zohydro in 2010. In a statement, the company’s president, Dr. Stephen J. Farr, said that the F.D.A. only recently laid out guidelines for the types of features it would like to see in opioid formulations that deter abuse.

“Zogenix is fully engaged in efforts to bring an abuse-deterrent-form formulation of Zohydro,” to market, he said.

Dr. Andrew J. Kolodny, the chief medical officer of Phoenix House, which runs drug and alcohol treatment centers in 10 states, said he believed that the American Society of Addiction Medicine should not take money from a company whose product would most likely worsen this country’s drug abuse problem