A new court filing asserts that pharmacies including CVS, Rite Aid, Walgreens and Giant Eagle as well as those operated by Walmart were as complicit in perpetuating the opioid crisis as were the manufacturers and distributors of the addictive drugs, the New York Times reports. The retailers sold millions of pills in tiny communities, offered bonuses for high-volume pharmacists and even worked directly with drug manufacturers to promote opioids as safe and effective, said the complaint filed in Cleveland federal court by two Ohio counties.
The court filing contends that CVS worked with Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, to offer promotional seminars on pain management to its pharmacists so they could reassure patients and doctors about the safety of the drug. From 2006 through 2014, the Rite Aid in Painesville, Oh., a town with a population of 19,524, sold over 4.2 million doses of oxycodone and hydrocodone. The companies have maintained that they were merely filling doctors’ prescriptions of legal medications. Despite being repeatedly fined by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the chains continued to sell outsize quantities of opioids, the complaint contends, only rarely sounding alarms. Walmart, for example, imposed a hard limit in 2012 on opioid quantities it would distribute to its stores, but allowed stores to make large opioid orders from other distributors. Until now, the focus of thousands of lawsuits across the country related to the opioid health crisis has largely been on drug manufacturers and distributors. The complaint filed on Wednesday was a major development in a far-reaching trial, scheduled for next May. Lake and Trumbull Counties in Ohio are suing the chains as distributors to their own pharmacies and as dispensers, whom the counties say intentionally fed customers’ appetite for opioids.