Walmart Accused Of Fueling Opioid Crisis In Justice Department Lawsuit

The Department of Justice is suing Walmart for allegedly helping to fuel the opioid crisis in the United States. The lawsuit accuses Walmart's pharmacies of filling thousands of illegitimate prescriptions for opioids and failing to report suspicious orders of drugs to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The Justice Department said that Walmart knew that its internal system for monitoring its pharmacies was "grossly inadequate" and did nothing to fix it. The lawsuit details numerous instances where the company ignored red flags and failed to address concerns from pharmacists that some prescribers were acting as pill mills in their communities.

In some cases, pharmacists filled prescriptions with dosage amounts that would have killed a person if they followed the instructions on the bottle. At least one employee admitted to DEA investigators that they filled prescriptions they knew were illegitimate.

"Walmart had important gatekeeping responsibilities to ensure that prescription opioids and other controlled substances were used legitimately and not abused," acting Civil Division Chief Jeffrey Bossert Clark said during a press briefing announcing the lawsuit. "But in both roles, Walmart violated the law and Walmart's unlawful conduct, which occurred nationwide, had disastrous consequences and harmed the many individuals who filled their prescriptions at Walmart and then abused the drug and it helped fuel a national crisis."

The Justice Department did not say why criminal charges have not been filed but did not rule out filing them in the future.

Walmart denied the allegations.

"This 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 in a statement. "Blaming pharmacists for not second-guessing the very doctors the Drug Enforcement Administration 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."

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