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Ignoring “red flag” warnings against suspicious prescriptions from its own pharmacists, Walmart turned a network of 5,000 national in-store pharmacies into a pipeline of highly addictive painkillers, the Justice Department’s alleges in its lawsuit.
Walmart understaffed those pharmacies while pressuring workers to fill prescriptions quickly – enabling widespread drug abuse -- in order to increase profits, the suit filed in US District Court for the District of Delaware contends.
In doing so, it says, Walmart violated the federal Controlled Substances Act in several ways.
“As one of the largest pharmacy chains and wholesale drug distributors in the country, Walmart had the responsibility and the means to help prevent the diversion of prescription opioids,” said Jeffrey Bossert Clark, acting assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Civil Division.
“Instead, for years, it did the opposite — filling thousands of invalid prescriptions at its pharmacies and failing to report suspicious orders of opioids and other drugs placed by those pharmacies,” Clark said.
Civil penalties being sought from Walmart in the Justice Department lawsuit could total billions of dollars while drastically changing the way the company does business, officials in Washington said.
If a court rules that Walmart violated the Controlled Substances Act, they said, the potential penalties would be up to $67,627 for each unlawful prescription filled and $15,691 for each suspicious order not reported.
Expecting the federal action, Walmart filed its own suit in October accusing the Department of Justice and DEA of scapegoating the company amid the Trump Administration's own inability to handle the opioid crisis.
The company accused federal authorities of investing “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.”
“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,” Walmart said in its filing.
The company said it has “always empowered our pharmacists to refuse to fill problematic opioids prescriptions, and they refused to fill hundreds of thousands of such prescriptions.”
“By demanding pharmacists and pharmacies second-guess doctors," Walmart added, "the Justice Department is putting pharmacists and pharmacies between a rock and a hard place with state health regulators who say they are already going too far in refusing to fill opioid prescriptions."
In its 160-page civil complaint, the government lays out a series of steps it says that Walmart took to get more customers inescapably hooked, beginning with cut-rate pain-killer prices that attracted shoppers to its stores.
Company executives ordered middle managers to push pharmacists to turn prescriptions around faster so that customers would stick around and continue shopping, the government alleges.
At the same time, the brass ignored repeated warnings about mistakes caused by understaffing, little to no screening of sketchy pharmacists and a pressure to produce that jeopardized patient’s health, federal authorities charged.
“Rather than analyzing the refusal-to-fill reports, the compliance unit viewed driving sales and patient awareness as a far better use of our Market Directors and Market Manager’s time," a company compliance director allegedly said.
In another of several examples from around the U.S., the suit cites alleged warnings from pharmacists that Walmart stores in Texas and Oklahoma were “getting slammed” by questionable prescriptions from a doctor under federal investigation whose clients had been cut off by other stores.
In response, it alleges, a Walmart compliance officer wrote in an email that an investigation “of itself is not a good reason to discontinue filling legitimate prescriptions.”
The pharmacies filled 14,700 more of the doctor’s prescriptions for another three years – an average of more than 13 a day for more than 1.5 million doses, the suit charges.
Prosecutors later obtained a conviction against the same physician, who was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison, it says.
“If all of us got together and started filling out refusal to fill” forms for one of the doctors, “that is all we would do all day long,” a Walmart pharmacy manager in Texas wrote to a compliance unit director, the suit says.
“Other chains are refusing to fill for him, which makes our burden even greater,” the manager wrote. “Please help us.”
The compliance unit rejected that request, along with several others, the Justice Department alleges.
The result: More doctors sent more patients with more prescriptions, increasing demand for ongoing addicts and new abusers – which, in turn, boosted inventory needs and, in turn, company profits, the lawsuit charges.
A reported 50,000 fatal opioid overdoses in the United States last year – a record high – could well be exceeded this year amid the COVID-19 pandemic, as isolation and stress increase and treatment options wither, the CDC says.
Amid the crisis, President Trump has pressed the Justice Department to target drug companies, particularly those who produce opioids, as well as those who illegally peddle highly addictive pain killers.
Purdue Pharma LP already has admitted wrongdoing in marketing and distributing OxyContin as part of an $8.34 million settlement with the government.
“We entrust distributors and dispensers with the responsibility to ensure controlled substances do not fall into the wrong hands,” said Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Acting Administrator Timothy Shea. “When processes to safeguard against drug diversion are violated or ignored, or when pharmacies routinely fill illegitimate prescriptions, we will hold accountable anyone responsible, including Walmart.
“Too many lives have been lost because of oversight failures and those entrusted with responsibility turning a blind eye.”
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