US is suing Walmart for role in fueling the opioid crisis

Walmart did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Walmart, the country’s largest retailer, anticipated this complaint and sued the federal government in October to pre-empt the allegations.

In its lawsuit, Walmart accused the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration of attempting to scapegoat the company for what it says are the federal government’s regulatory and enforcement deficiencies.

The Justice Department lawsuit alleges that Walmart has developed a system that has turned its network of 5,000 in-store US pharmacies into a leading provider of highly addictive painkillers. The charges date back to June 2013.

Walmart started cutting opioid prices that initially drove shoppers to its stores, the government claims. Middle managers – led by executives at the company’s headquarters – are pressuring their pharmacists to work faster, the suit says, believing that quick prescriptions drive customers to stay and keep shopping.

Many of the alleged issues were centered in Walmart’s compliance unit, which oversaw nationwide distribution from the company’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., The lawsuit said. Walmart ignored repeated warnings that the company was understaffing its pharmacies and that pressure to sell quickly led to errors and a risk to patient health, the complaint said.

The US lawsuit said this system made it difficult for pharmacists to reject prescriptions from doctors who deliberately over-prescribe, and when they did, the customers often just went to another Walmart. Pharmacists received little help from compliance managers who did not exchange information between stores for years and, in many cases, requesting general rejections to be denied to suspected prescribers, even if competing retailers had already done so, the indictment alleges.

“Instead of analyzing the denial reports, the compliance unit looked at ‘[d]sales awareness and patient awareness “as” a much better use of the time of our market directors and market manager, “said the Department of Justice, citing a director of compliance at the company. “Given the nationwide scale of those violations, Walmart’s failure to comply with fundamental legal rules helped fuel a national crisis.”

The Justice Department is taking action to get Walmart to recognize the role it must have in the fight against the opioid crisis, Jeffrey Clark, acting chief of the department’s civilian division, said in an interview.

“It’s not isolated or left off the hook just because the pill factory doctor writes the prescription,” said Mr. Clark. “Pharmacists have a duty not to just fill in a prescription that comes in.”

In its lawsuit, Walmart is asking for a statement from a federal judge that the government has no legal basis for seeking civil damages for the types of actions the Justice Department is now alleging. The lawsuit cites the department and Attorney General William Barr as defendants, as does the DEA and its acting administrator, Timothy Shea.

The Department of Justice previously launched a parallel criminal investigation, based out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Texas, in connection with Walmart’s provision of opioids. The Washington division’s leadership decided in 2018 not to press charges, but to focus on a civil lawsuit, said a person familiar with the case.

According to federal data, the U.S. saw about 50,000 fatal opioid overdoses in 2019, a record high that reversed a short-lived delay in steady increases a year earlier.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last week that there is growing evidence that the crisis is getting worse during the Covid-19 pandemic, which has complicated treatment while increasing isolation and stress.

President Trump has pushed the Justice Department to take action against companies, albeit mostly opioid makers. In 2018, he asked then Attorney General Jeff Sessions to file the federal government’s “big lawsuit” against pharmaceutical companies that “are actually sending opioids at a level it shouldn’t be happening.”

Since then, Purdue Pharma LP has pleaded guilty to three federal felonies related to the marketing and distribution of its powerful opioid pain reliever OxyContin. That came as part of a $ 8.34 billion settlement with the Justice Department.

Purdue is one of three drug manufacturers to file for bankruptcy in recent years to negotiate a settlement of hundreds of lawsuits. Counties and states are also nearing a $ 26 billion opioid settlement with drug company Johnson & Johnson and three major drug distributors.

Walmart is one of the many other major companies targeted in such lawsuits, which have been filed by more than 20 states and many local governments claiming that aggressive marketing of prescription painkillers contributed to the crisis. About 3,000 of the cases have been consolidated in federal court in Ohio, where a judge urged both parties to reach a settlement for nearly three years.

The federal government lawsuit portrays a business in which pharmacists reportedly were often stressed by the combined pressure they felt from managers and from an unfolding crisis they saw firsthand. Alleged company orders to work quickly did not allow them to scrutinize every suspicious prescription, and they repeatedly sought permission to use blanket rejections against clinics they believed were obvious pill factories, the suit says.

“If we all got together and started filling out the refusal to fill out forms for a pill factory prescriber,” that’s all we’d be doing all day, “wrote a pharmacy manager at Walmart in Texas. February 6, 2015, email to a director of the compliance unit, the suit says, “Other chains refuse to fill for him, adding to our burden. Please help us.”

The compliance unit is said to have declined that request and many others, telling pharmacists that, according to the lawsuit, they could only decide on a case-by-case basis. That basically led Walmart pharmacists to deliver to abusers – and encouraged more doctors to send patients to Walmart pharmacies – the government claims, because they didn’t have time to review and fill in the required paperwork for thousands of individual rejections. to fill.

Walmart later reversed course and allowed blanket rejections for suspected prescribers, the suit says. It doesn’t say when, except that the company was following other major grocery and pharmacy chains that already gave that power to their pharmacists.

In its own lawsuit, Walmart said that nearly 70% of doctors identified as problematic by the federal government still have active DEA registrations, the company said.

In other words, defendants want to blame Walmart for continuing to fill out alleged bad prescriptions written by doctors who allowed the DEA and government regulators to write those prescriptions in the first place and who still assist today. Walmart said in its lawsuit.

US attorneys claim that Walmart’s compliance managers should have followed and shared these reports from their own pharmacists to help reject these prescriptions, but they did not. In its 160-page complaint, the government details 20 alleged cases where Walmart ignored the red flags, withheld information from its pharmacists, and failed to help them reject invalid prescriptions, filling hundreds and sometimes thousands of them.

—Sarah Nassauer contributed to this article.

Write to Timothy Puko at [email protected] and Sadie Gurman at [email protected]