The Department of Justice (DOJ) hit drugstore chain Walgreens with a lawsuit this week for filling “unlawful” opioid prescriptions that had no “legitimate” medical purpose for over a decade.
The lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois on Thursday, alleges that Walgreens’ pharmacists filled millions of prescriptions despite “red flags” indicating that they were likely to be unlawful and that it pressured its pharmacists to fill prescriptions while not taking the necessary time to “confirm their validity.”
“Walgreens allegedly ignored substantial evidence from multiple sources that its stores were dispensing unlawful prescriptions, including from its own pharmacists and internal data,” the DOJ said in a Friday press release.
“These practices allowed millions of opioid pills and other controlled substances to flow illegally out of Walgreens stores,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian M. Boynton added in a statement.
The government alleged the company violated the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) by dispensing millions of unlawful prescriptions. The lawsuit alleges that Walgreens, which has over 8,000 pharmacies across the country, also breached the False Claims Act (FCA) by seeking reimbursement for many of the prescriptions from a variety of federal healthcare programs.
“These laws are critically important in protecting our communities from the dangers of the opioid epidemic,” said acting U.S. Attorney Morris Pasqual for the Northern District of Illinois. “Our office will continue to work with our law enforcement partners to ensure that opioids are properly dispensed and that taxpayer funds are only spent on legitimate pharmacy claims.”
The DOJ said that four different whistleblowers, who used to work at Walgreens, filed whistleblower actions. Walgreens said it will stand behind its pharmacists and asked the court to shield the drugstore corporation from DOJ attempts to enforce “arbitrary rules.”
“We are asking the court to clarify the responsibilities of pharmacies and pharmacists and to protect against the government’s attempt to enforce arbitrary ‘rules’ that do not appear in any law or regulation and never went through any official rulemaking process,” Wallgreens said on Friday.
“We will not stand by and allow the government to put our pharmacists in a no-win situation, trying to comply with ‘rules’ that simply do not exist,” the company said, adding it looks forward to defending the “professionalism and integrity of our pharmacists.”
The DOJ filed a similar lawsuit last month, that time against CVS Health, accusing the retail behemoth of aiding the opioid crisis by knowingly filling illegal prescriptions in an effort to “prize profits over patient safety.”