The AP reports that on Tuesday, the Justice Department “sued Walmart…accusing it of fueling the nation’s opioid crisis by pressuring its pharmacies to fill even potentially suspicious prescriptions for the powerful painkillers.” The AP says “the civil complaint filed Tuesday points to the role Walmart’s pharmacies may have played in the crisis by filling opioid prescriptions and by unlawfully distributing controlled substances to the pharmacies during the height of the opioid crisis.” According to the AP, DOJ “alleges Walmart violated federal law by selling thousands of prescriptions for controlled substances that its pharmacists ‘knew were invalid,’ said Jeffrey Clark, the acting assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s civil division.”
Bloomberg reports the US “alleges the retailer sought to boost profits with a system designed to make it almost impossible for overworked store pharmacists to catch red flags about overly large numbers of painkiller prescriptions. … ‘Given the nationwide scale of those violations, Walmart’s failures to follow basic legal rules helped fuel a national crisis,’ the U.S. said in the complaint filed in federal court in Wilmington.” The Washington Post reports that the DOJ is “seeking civil penalties that could total billions of dollars, it said in a news release.”
Reuters reports the Justice Department claims Walmart “created a system that turned its 5,000 in-store pharmacies into a supplier of highly addictive painkillers, dating as early as June 2013.” According to Reuters, “The lawsuit marked one of the most significant actions the Justice Department has taken in response to the epidemic targeting companies accused of contributing to it.” Reuters says Walmart described the lawsuit as a “transparent attempt to shift blame from the (Drug Enforcement Administration) well-documented failures in keeping bad doctors from prescribing opioids in the first place.”
From the news release of the American Association for Justice.
