Rite Aid sued by US, accused of ignoring ‘red flags’ for opioid prescriptions

The Justice Department on Monday announced that it is suing Rite Aid, accusing the pharmacy chain of knowingly filling prescriptions for controlled substances like opioids despite numerous “red flags” that indicated the prescriptions were unlawful.

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In a complaint, authorities said that from May 2014 through June 2019, Rite Aid “filled at least hundreds of thousands of unlawful prescriptions for controlled substances that were medically unnecessary, lacked a medically accepted indication, or were not issued in the usual course of professional practice.”

Officials said the chain’s pharmacists ignored “red flags” and filled prescriptions “despite knowing, based on their training and experience, that they had a legal obligation not to fill them.” In the complaint, authorities said Rite Aid deleted internal warnings written by pharmacists, including one that questioned whether a prescriber was a “cash only pill mill???” and one in which a prescriber was noted for “writing excessive dose[s] for oxycodone.”

“These practices opened the floodgates for millions of opioid pills and other controlled substances to flow illegally out of Rite Aid’s stores,” Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said in a statement.

The Justice Department joined a whistleblower lawsuit filed in 2019 by Rite Aid employees at stores in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and West Virginia, Reuters reported. The agency sometimes joins such cases when they consider them to be strong, according to Reuters.

On Monday, Attorney General Merrick Garland said the Justice Department was “using every tool at our disposal to confront the opioid epidemic that is killing Americans and shattering communities across the country.”

“That includes holding corporations, like Rite Aid, accountable for knowingly filling unlawful prescriptions for controlled substances,” he said.

Rite Aid is one of the largest drugstore chains in the country, with more than 2,200 stores in 17 states.

In December 2020, the Justice Department sued Walmart for its alleged role in unlawfully dispensing controlled substances from its pharmacies. Authorities sued drug distributor Amerisource Bergen Corp. in December 2022, accusing the company and two of its subsidiaries of contributing to the prescription opioid epidemic.

In 2021, the last date for which data was available, an estimated 107,600 people died of drug overdoses nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Opioids accounted for about 80,800 of those deaths, officials said.