Walmart will pay $50 million to settle claims that its pharmacies filled hundreds of thousands of suspicious prescriptions for opioids, which helped fuel a national drug abuse crisis, the Justice Department said on Friday.
Government lawyers alleged in 2020 that Walmart, the largest retailer in the country, failed to detect suspicious orders and report them to the Drug Enforcement Administration, according to court records.
When employees flagged these questionable practices, they were ignored in part to drive sales, the Justice Department said in a news release.
“Over an approximately four-year period, a time during which Walmart shipped an estimated 37.5 million controlled-substance orders to its pharmacies, it reported only 204 suspicious orders to D.E.A. — in other words, almost none,” according to court papers.
A Walmart spokeswoman in a statement on Friday said the company was pleased to resolve the case.
In a statement in 2020, Jeffrey Bossert Clark, acting assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s civil division, said, “As one of the largest pharmacy chains and wholesale drug distributors in the country, Walmart had the responsibility and the means to help prevent the diversion of prescription opioids.”
The settlement announced on Friday is the latest step in the government’s attempts to hold companies accountable for what it says were their roles in the opioid epidemic.
From 1999 to 2023, approximately 806,000 people died from an opioid overdose, including deaths involving illegal and prescription opioids, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In 2022, Walmart agreed to distribute $3.1 billion to end thousands of lawsuits brought by local governments and tribes.
Kroger, a grocery chain, agreed in 2023 to pay $1.2 billion to states, local governments and tribes to settle claims that its retail pharmacies played a role in fueling the opioid crisis.
Its pharmacies were accused of improperly monitoring opioid prescriptions. The company said at the time that it was not admitting any wrongdoing.
The federal lawsuit against Walmart cited an instance in which a Walmart employee admitted to filling illegitimate prescriptions.
Some pharmacists had filled prescriptions for large doses that could have killed a patient, according to the lawsuit.
Pharmacists in Florida alerted the company’s compliance unit about a doctor they called “shady” who had patients slurring their words and showing signs of “narcotic abuse,” according to the lawsuit.
Walmart was accused of filling more than 3,500 “controlled-substance prescriptions” for the doctor, according to the lawsuit. The prescriptions had “obvious red flags,” the release said.
The settlement requires Walmart to create a hotline for employees and patients to report “suspected illegal dispensing of controlled substances” and monitor the pharmacies’ “dispensing patterns,” the release said.
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