Walmart Sold Drugs?… US Department of Justice Sues Over Opioid Abuse Allegations

Walmart "Victim of Policy Failure"

[Image source=EPA Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Kwon Jae-hee] Walmart, the largest retail chain in the U.S., has been sued by the Department of Justice for alleged prescription opioid abuse. Opioids are narcotic painkillers made from synthetic components such as fentanyl and codeine, which produce effects similar to opium. They are generally prescribed to relieve pain for post-surgery patients or cancer patients, but in the U.S., they have spread as a substitute for narcotics, leading to addiction and death, becoming a serious social issue. The Department of Justice believes Walmart profited enormously by effectively enabling the sale and distribution of opioids.

According to the Wall Street Journal on the 22nd (local time), the Department of Justice claims that Walmart deliberately reduced the number of pharmacy staff in stores and pressured for faster prescription processing, which triggered opioid abuse. In other words, pharmacists employed in Walmart pharmacies were unable to properly review prescriptions and ended up selling opioids.

The Department of Justice pointed out, "Considering the nationwide scale of this incident, Walmart's failure to comply with regulations was a factor in the spread of the narcotic painkiller crisis."

According to the complaint submitted by the Department of Justice to the federal court in Delaware, unlike competitors, Walmart did not share information between branches about customers who were refused drug purchases due to problematic prescriptions, allowing customers who were denied at one Walmart to purchase drugs at another. Additionally, the Department of Justice added that Walmart attracted addicts by selling opioids at low prices.

The Department of Justice reports that this system of Walmart caused the opioid abuse crisis across the U.S. The opioid crisis became a serious social problem as U.S. pharmaceutical companies, doctors, and pharmacies colluded systematically to indiscriminately prescribe highly addictive narcotic painkillers, opioids, to patients. According to the U.S. federal government, 50,000 people died from opioid overdoses in the U.S. in 2019 alone. Walmart is the largest pharmacy chain and drug distributor in the U.S., with about 5,000 pharmacy stores nationwide.

Last October, Walmart preemptively filed a lawsuit before the Department of Justice's suit, claiming, "The U.S. government is trying to make Walmart a scapegoat for policy failures." They argue that there is no problem with drug sales according to prescriptions.

However, despite these claims, if Walmart is found responsible, it is reported that Walmart could face fines of up to $67,627 (about 74.99 million KRW) per illegal prescription and up to $15,691 (about 17.4 million KRW) per unreported suspicious order. Depending on the scale of the abused prescriptions, massive fines could be imposed, raising concerns that a "second Purdue case" might be repeated. Previously, in 2019, Purdue Pharma went bankrupt after being fined up to $10 billion (about 11 trillion KRW) for manufacturing the narcotic painkiller OxyContin.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.