The US supports Walmart, the alleged role in fueling the opioid crisis

Walmart did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The country’s largest retailer by revenue, Walmart was awaiting this complaint and sued the federal government in October to combat the charges preventively.

In its lawsuit, Walmart accuses the Department of Justice and the Drug Control Administration of trying to atone for the company for what it says are government regulatory and law enforcement deficiencies.

The Justice Department’s lawsuit alleges that Walmart created a system that turned its network of 5,000 pharmacies in US stores into a major supplier of highly addictive painkillers. The allegations date back to June 2013, according to the trial.

Walmart started with low prices for opioids that initially drove buyers to its stores, the government says. Intermediate managers – under the guidance of executives at the company’s headquarters – pressured their pharmacists to work faster, the process says, considering that quick-fill prescriptions have attracted customers to stay and continue to buy.

Many of the alleged problems focused on the Walmart compliance unit, which oversaw the nationwide distribution of the company’s main office in Bentonville, Ark., Says the lawsuit. Walmart ignored repeated warnings that the company was not adequately equipped with its pharmacies and that the pressure to sell quickly leads to mistakes and endangers the patient’s health, according to the complaint.

The US lawsuit said the system made it difficult for pharmacists to reject prescriptions from doctors who intentionally overcharged, and when they did, customers would often go to another Walmart. Pharmacists have received little help from compliance managers who have not shared information between stores for years and in many cases have refused requests to offer general rejections to suspect doctors, even when rival retailers they have already done so, the lawsuit claims.

“Instead of reviewing reports of refusal to complete, the compliance unit viewed”[d]increasing sales and raising patient awareness as “a much better use of the time of market managers and the market manager,” the Justice Department said, citing a company compliance director. “Given the national scale of these violations, Walmart’s failure to comply with basic legal rules has helped fuel a national crisis.”

The Justice Department is taking steps to help Walmart recognize the role it must play in combating the opiate crisis, Jeffrey Clark, acting head of the department’s civil division, said in an interview.

“It’s not isolated or set aside just because the doctor who makes the pills writes the prescription,” said Mr. Clark. Pharmacists have a duty not only to complete any prescription that enters the door.

Walmart, in its lawsuit, is seeking a statement from a federal judge that the government has no legal basis to seek civil damages for the types of actions the Department of Justice is now claiming. The trial names the department and Attorney General William Barr as defendants, as well as the DEA and its incumbent administrator, Timothy Shea.

The Justice Department has previously launched a parallel criminal investigation, based in the US attorney’s office for the East Texas district, related to Walmart’s distribution of opioids. The leadership of the Washington department decided in 2018 not to act, instead focusing on a civil lawsuit, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The US saw about 50,000 fatal opioid overdoses in 2019, according to federal data, a record level that reversed what had been a brief improvement from 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 as isolation and stress increase.

President Trump has pushed the Justice Department to take action against companies, albeit primarily opioid manufacturers. In 2018, he called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to bring his own “major lawsuit” by the federal government against pharmaceutical companies that “really send opioids to a level they shouldn’t.”

Since then, Purdue Pharma LP has pleaded guilty to three federal offenses related to the marketing and distribution of its powerful opioid analgesic OxyContin. It came as part of a $ 8.34 billion deal with the Justice Department.

Purdue is one of three drug manufacturers to go bankrupt in recent years to negotiate a settlement of hundreds of lawsuits. Counties and states are also approaching a $ 26 billion opioid settlement, along with drugmaker Johnson & Johnson and three major drug distributors.

Walmart is one of several large companies involved in such lawsuits, filed by more than two dozen states and many local governments that claim that the aggressive marketing of prescription painkillers has helped fuel the crisis. About 3,000 cases have been settled in a federal court in Ohio, where a judge has pressured both sides to settle for nearly three years.

The federal government’s trial depicts a company in which line pharmacists have often been stressed by the combined pressure they felt from managers and an ongoing crisis they witnessed directly. The company’s alleged orders to operate quickly did not allow them to examine every suspicious prescription and repeatedly asked permission to use blanket rejection against clinics they believed were obvious pill factories, the lawsuit says.

“If we all got together and started filling out the refusal forms to fill out,” for a prescription, “that’s all we’d do all day,” wrote a Texas Walmart pharmacy manager. a February 6, 2015, send an email to a director of the compliance unit, says the process. “Other chains refuse to fill it, which makes our burden even greater. Please help us. “

The compliance unit allegedly rejected that request and many more, telling pharmacists that they could only decide on a case-by-case basis according to the process. This effectively led Walmart pharmacists to provide aggressors – and encouraged more doctors to send patients to Walmart pharmacies – the government claims, as they did not have time to review and complete the documents required for thousands of individual rejections.

Walmart later reversed the course and allowed the blanket to be rejected for the suspects, the lawsuit says. It does not say when, apart from noticing that the company pursued other important foods and pharmacy chains that have already given this power to their pharmacists.

In its own lawsuit, Walmart said nearly 70 percent of doctors the federal government has identified as having problems continue to have active DEA records, the company said.

“In other words, the defendants want to blame Walmart for continuing to supplement the allegedly poor prescriptions written by doctors that the DEA and state regulators allowed to write those prescriptions first and foremost to remain today.” , Walmart said in its lawsuit.

U.S. attorneys say Walmart compliance managers should have tracked and shared these reports with their line pharmacists to help reject those prescriptions, but they didn’t. In its 160-page complaint, the government details 20 alleged cases in which Walmart ignored red flags, withheld information from its pharmacists and did not help them reject invalid prescriptions, allowing hundreds and sometimes thousands of them to be completed. .

—Sarah Nassauer contributed to this article.

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