The Justice Department accuses Walmart of fuelling the opioid crisis

“THE OPIOID epidemic is as bad as ever,” says Caleb Alexander at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In a year when all eyes were on the death toll from covid-19, about 80,000 Americans died from drug overdoses from June 2019 to May 2020, more than during any other 12-month period ever recorded, according to preliminary figures from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. Both federal and state governments have been suing companies for their part in this. On December 22nd the Department of Justice (DOJ) added a high-profile suit against Walmart.

The DOJ accuses the world’s biggest retailer, which also manages some 5,000 in-store pharmacies, of fuelling the opioid epidemic by screening questionable prescriptions lackadaisically, despite repeated warnings from its own pharmacists. The suit was expected. Some counties have already sued other pharmacies. In October Walmart sued the DOJ pre-emptively, asking a federal court to clarify the responsibilities of pharmacists under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), an unusual step that seemed to be primarily a public-relations exercise.

In its complaint, filed at a court in Delaware, the DOJ alleges that Walmart violated the CSA in various ways, as the operator both of pharmacies and of wholesale drug-distribution centres. Under pressure from their...