DOJ's Responds to Walmart's Criticism With Lawsuit

In another notable instance of pot calling kettle black drama,* the Department of Justice filed a civil complaint to allege that Walmart knowingly filled thousands of unlawful prescriptions. For the company’s alleged Controlled Substances Act violations — including its “ultralow rate of suspicious-order reporting” — the DOJ seeks injunctive relief and civil penalties in the “billions.”

Walmart responded by decrying the DOJ’s hypocrisy: “Blaming pharmacists for not second-guessing the very doctors DEA 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.”

The DOJ’s filing comes after a “multi-year” investigation by its Prescription Interdiction & Litigation (PIL) Task Force, and exactly two months after Walmart filed its own action against federal agencies in a preemptive counterstrike. In its October complaint, Walmart accused the DOJ and DEA of “attempting to scapegoat the company for … the federal government’s own regulatory and enforcement shortcomings” (WSJ).

(* For a deep dive, please see Why do we blame big pharma and not the DEA or FDA?)