U.S. sues Walmart, alleging role in fueling opioid crisis

The Trump administration sued Walmart Inc. Tuesday, accusing the retail giant of helping to fuel the nation’s opioid crisis by inadequately screening for questionable prescriptions despite repeated warnings from its own pharmacists. “Blaming pharmacists for not second-guessing the very doctors 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, adding that it “always empowered our pharmacists to refuse to fill problematic opioids prescriptions, and they refused to fill hundreds of thousands of such prescriptions." In one instance, the suit says, pharmacists allegedly warned superiors that Walmart stores in Texas and Oklahoma were “getting slammed" by suspect prescriptions from a doctor in East Texas who was under federal investigation and that other stores had cut off his clients. “By demanding pharmacists and pharmacies second-guess doctors, 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," the company said in its statement.