Reuters
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The US Department of Justice introduced a lawsuit on Wednesday accusing pharmacy chain CVS of filling unlawful opioid prescriptions and billing federal medical health insurance packages, contributing to a nationwide epidemic of opioid habit and overdose.
The newly unsealed grievance in Providence, Rhode Island, federal court docket alleges that, from October 2013 to the current, CVS violated the federal Controlled Substances Act by filling prescriptions for harmful portions of opioids and harmful mixtures of medication.
It mentioned the corporate commonly stuffed prescriptions from medical doctors operating so-called tablet mills, dishing out massive portions of opioids with out respectable medical purpose.
The Justice Department mentioned the violations had been pushed by company-mandated efficiency metrics that led to crimson flags being ignored, and that in some circumstances sufferers died of overdoses shortly after filling unlawful prescriptions.
“We have cooperated with the DOJ’s investigation for greater than 4 years, and we strongly disagree with the allegations and false narrative inside this grievance,” CVS mentioned in a press release.
CVS agreed in 2022 to pay near $5 billion over 10 years to settle 1000’s of comparable claims by state, native and Native American tribal governments. It didn’t admit wrongdoing below the deal, which was one among a sequence of nationwide settlements by pharmacies, drugmakers and distributors totaling about $46 billion.
The Justice Department’s lawsuit unsealed on Wednesday started as a whistleblower grievance introduced by a former CVS worker.
According to the lawsuit, CVS maintained insufficient staffing and pushed its pharmacists to fill prescriptions as rapidly as doable with out investigating whether or not they had been respectable, and ignored warnings from its personal workers.
“Safety points come up when one is coping with remedy and in addition being rushed to satisfy an order like McDonald’s,” one worker allegedly wrote. “CVS has concocted an assembly-line model of remedy preparation and solely cares about income.”
The firm continued to fill lots of of prescriptions for one Alabama physician even after a number of inside notes warned in 2015 that he was below investigation, the grievance mentioned. That physician was arrested in 2016.
It stuffed 1000’s of prescriptions for a Pennsylvania physician regardless of inside warnings and on-line affected person opinions saying he “writes scripts with out seeing the affected person” and is “a tablet pusher, and a drunk,” the Justice Department mentioned.
The grievance described 10 particular person sufferers who died, allegedly after filling unlawful prescriptions for opioids and different medicine at CVS.
More than 800,000 folks within the United States died of opioid overdoses from 1999 via 2023, in line with information from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Preliminary information exhibits overdoses started to lower final 12 months.
