Justice Department Sues Walmart Over Opioid Sales

The U.S. government sued Walmart Tuesday (Dec. 22), claiming that the retail giant exacerbated the country’s opioid crisis by not sufficiently keeping watch for suspect prescriptions despite warnings by its own pharmacists about the problem, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The suit by the Department of Justice (DOJ) alleges that Walmart aimed to make more money by not sufficiently staffing its pharmacies while making workers expediently fill prescriptions. Pharmacists had a challenging time turning down invalid prescriptions as a result, allowing for broad drug abuse throughout the country, the lawsuit claims, according to the WSJ. The publication quoted federal data as saying the United States saw approximately 50,000 fatal opioid overdoses last year.

Jeffrey Clark, acting chief of the DOJ’s Civil Division, told WSJ that the government wants Walmart to recognize the role it must play in fighting the opioid abuse.

“It’s not isolated or left off the hook just because the pill-mill doctor writes the prescription,” Clark said in the report. “Pharmacists have a duty not to just fill whatever prescription comes in the door.”

But Walmart rejected such allegations, calling the DOJ’s investigation “tainted by historical ethics violations.”

“… 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 (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.”

Walmart, the nation’s biggest retailer in revenue terms, had been anticipating the complaint. In October, the chain proactively sued the DOJ and the DEA, asking a federal court to “clarify the roles and responsibilities of pharmacists and pharmacies under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).”

In a statement issued at the time, Walmart alleged that “certain DOJ officials have long seemed more focused on chasing headlines than fixing the crisis. They are now threatening a completely unjustified lawsuit against Walmart, claiming in hindsight pharmacists should have refused to fill otherwise valid opioid prescriptions that were written by the very doctors that the federal government still approves to write prescriptions.”