US sues Walmart, accusing it of fuelling opioid crisis
- The lawsuit says the retail giant created a system that turned its 5,000 in-store pharmacies into a supplier of highly addictive painkillers
- The opioid epidemic has claimed the lives of roughly 450,000 people across the US since 1999 due to overdoses
The US Justice Department sued Walmart Inc on Tuesday, accusing the retailer of fuelling the opioid crisis in the United States, ignoring warning signs from its pharmacists and filling thousands of invalid prescriptions.
In a civil lawsuit filed in US District Court in Delaware, the department accused Walmart of failing to take its gatekeeping duties as a pharmacy seriously.
Walmart, the world’s biggest retailer, created a system that turned its 5,000 in-store pharmacies into a supplier of highly addictive painkillers, dating as early as June 2013, the lawsuit said.
Walmart, whose shares were trading down 1.5 per cent following the news, rejected the allegations, saying the “Justice Department’s investigation is tainted by historical ethics violations, and this lawsuit invents a legal theory that unlawfully forces pharmacists to come between patients and their doctors, and is riddled with factual inaccuracies”.
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The retailer called the lawsuit a “transparent attempt to shift blame from the ”(Drug Enforcement Administration) well-documented failures in keeping bad doctors from prescribing opioids in the first place”.
The lawsuit marked one of the most significant actions the Justice Department has taken in response to the epidemic targeting companies accused of contributing to it.