The Justice Department is suing Walmart, alleging that the country’s largest retailer unlawfully dispensed controlled substances through its pharmacies and contributed to the country’s opioid crisis.
In a civil complaint filed Tuesday, the federal government alleges that Walmart pressured its pharmacists to fill out opioid prescriptions quickly and deny them the option to reject invalid prescriptions. As a result, the complaint alleges, those pharmacists knowingly filled out thousands of prescriptions that came from “ pill factories, ” prescriptions for certain widely abused drug combinations, and prescriptions that other Walmart pharmacies had declared invalid. The latter meant that “when a Walmart pharmacist acknowledged that a customer’s prescription was invalid, the customer could simply look around to another Walmart pharmacist or store to fill out the same or a similar prescription,” the complaint reads.
The government also accuses Walmart of failing to detect and report suspicious prescriptions to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, as required by law.
“Walmart knew that its distribution centers were using an inadequate system to track and report suspicious orders,” Jason Dunn, the US attorney for Colorado, said during a meeting with reporters. “Walmart reported virtually no suspicious orders for years as a result of this inadequate system.”
Walmart operates more than 5,000 pharmacies in its stores across the country.
As a nationwide dispenser and distributor of opioids, and given the large number of pharmacies it operates, Walmart was uniquely well positioned to prevent the illegal diversion of opioids. For years, however, as the drug abuse epidemic ravaged the country, Walmart stepped down. responsibilities, ”the complaint says.
Walmart: Bad doctors are to blame
In a statement, Walmart said the government’s lawsuit “is riddled with factual inaccuracies and handpicked documents taken out of context.
Blaming pharmacists for not questioning the doctors the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has approved to prescribe opioids is a transparent attempt to put the blame on DEA’s well-documented failures in deterring bad doctors from Prescribe opioids in the first place, ”the statement said.
“Walmart has always empowered our pharmacists to refuse to fill out problem opioid prescriptions, and they refused to fill out hundreds of thousands of such prescriptions. Walmart sent DEA tens of thousands of study leaders, and we blocked thousands of questionable doctors from having their opioid prescriptions filled out at our pharmacies,” the statement said.
In October, Walmart has filed his own preventive lawsuit against the Department of Justice, Attorney General William Barr and the Drug Enforcement Administration. In that lawsuit, Walmart said the Department of Justice investigation – initiated in 2016 – had identified hundreds of doctors writing problematic prescriptions that Walmart pharmacists should not have filled out. But the Walmart lawsuit charged that nearly 70% of doctors still have active registrations with the DEA.
Walmart’s lawsuit alleged that the government blamed it for the lack of regulatory and enforcement policies to end the crisis. The company is asking a federal judge to declare that the government has no basis on which to file civil damages, and the lawsuit is still pending.
Bridget Brown and The Associated Press of CBS News contributed to this report.