U.S. sues Walmart in opioids civil case

Filled suspicious Rxs, agency says

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department sued Walmart on Tuesday, accusing it of fueling the nation’s opioid crisis by pressuring its pharmacies to fill even potentially suspicious prescriptions for the powerful painkillers.

In the civil complaint, the Department of Justice 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.

The government is seeking civil penalties that could total billions of dollars, according to the news release.

Federal law required Walmart to report suspicious orders for controlled substances to the Drug Enforcement Administration, but prosecutors say the company didn’t do that.

“Walmart knew that its distribution centers were using an inadequate system for detecting and reporting

suspicious orders,” said Jason Dunn, the U.S. attorney in Colorado. “As a result of this inadequate system, for years Walmart reported virtually no suspicious orders at all. In other words, Walmart’s pharmacies ordered opioids in a way that went essentially unmonitored and unregulated.”

Walmart called the investigation “tainted by historical ethics violations” and said in a statement that the Justice Department should focus on “bad doctors” who write prescriptions instead of blaming the pharmacists who fill them.

The 160-page lawsuit alleges that Walmart made it difficult for its pharmacists to follow the rules, putting “enormous pressure” on them to fill a high volume of prescriptions as fast as possible, while at the same time denying them the authority to categorically refuse to fill prescriptions issued by prescribers who the pharmacists knew were continually issuing invalid prescriptions.

The suit alleged problems in Walmart’s compliance department, which oversaw the dispensing nationwide of controlled substance prescriptions. In particular, even

after Walmart pharmacists informed the compliance unit about “pill-mill” prescribers whose practices raised red flags, Walmart continued to fill prescriptions issued by those prescribers, according to the suit. The suit said that only later did Walmart allow pharmacists to do blanket refusals for suspicious practices.

Walmart responded in an emailed statement to The Associated Press, saying the “lawsuit invents a legal theory that unlawfully forces pharmacists to come between patients and their doctors, and is riddled with factual inaccuracies and cherry-picked documents taken out of context.”

Walmart said it always empowered its pharmacists to refuse to fill problematic opioid prescriptions and that the pharmacists refused to fill hundreds of thousands of such prescriptions. Walmart also said it sent the Drug Enforcement Administration tens of thousands of investigative leads and blocked thousands of questionable doctors from having their opioid prescriptions filled at its pharmacies.

Walmart filed its own preemptive lawsuit against the Justice Department, Attorney General William Barr and the Drug Enforcement Administration nearly two months ago.

In its lawsuit, Walmart said the Justice Department’s investigation — opened in 2016 — had identified hundreds of doctors who wrote problematic prescriptions that Walmart’s pharmacists should not have filled. But the lawsuit alleged that nearly 70% of the doctors still have active registrations with the DEA.

“Blaming pharmacists for not second-guessing the very doctors the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) approved to prescribe opioids is a transparent attempt to shift blame from DEA’s well-documented failures in keeping bad doctors from prescribing opioids in the first place,” the company said in its statement.

Walmart’s lawsuit alleged that the government was blaming the retailer for the lack of regulatory and enforcement policies to stem the crisis.

The company is asking a federal judge to declare that the government’s suit has no basis to seek civil damages. That suit remains ongoing.

“We are bringing this lawsuit because there is no federal law requiring pharmacists to interfere in the doctor-patient relationship to the degree DOJ is demanding,” Walmart said in a statement at the time. “Unfortunately, certain DOJ officials have long seemed more focused on chasing headlines than fixing the crisis.”

Walmart ordered 5.5 billion oxycodone or hydrocodone pills between 2006 and 2012, making it the country’s third-largest buyer of those pills, behind Walgreens and CVS, according to a Washington Post analysis of DEA data.

The retail giant operates 11,500 stores worldwide, including 5,300 Walmart and Sam’s Club stores in the United States. It is the nation’s largest private employer, with roughly 1.5 million U.S. workers.

The Wall Street Journal was the first to report on the Department of Justice lawsuit. Walmart shares fell $1.77, or 1.2%, to close Tuesday at $144.20. The company’s stock has risen 21% so far this year.

Tuesday’s lawsuit comes after a civil suit filed last summer by cities, towns, counties and American Indian tribes across the country alleging that retailers such as Walmart, CVS, Rite Aid and Walgreens played a role in the opioid epidemic by distributing billions of pills. A number of those federal trials, in states including Ohio, West Virginia and Texas, have been delayed during the pandemic.

Last month, Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, pleaded guilty to three felonies and agreed to an $8.3 billion settlement with the Justice Department for its role in a crisis that has killed more than 400,000 Americans during the past two decades.

Roughly 50,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses last year, a record, federal data show, and medical experts have warned that the coronavirus pandemic and economic crisis have led to new spikes.

Legal experts said the government’s case against Walmart is unlikely to be resolved quickly, which means the incoming Biden administration will have to decide whether to pursue it.

“The filing today multiplies the legal problems that Walmart faces,” said Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law.

Clark

Dunn