The Alabama Attorney General has reached a $44 million settlement agreement with Walmart to fund opioid abatement in the state.
“Many of Alabama’s cities and counties have been pummeled by an epidemic that began with prescription opioids and has intensified to illicit opioids like heroin and fentanyl,” Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a
press release. “In fact, this year, fentanyl and other opioids were recorded as the number one greatest drug threat in the State of Alabama. The agreement we have reached with Walmart will accelerate another funding stream to our locals, providing immediate aid to their fight against addiction and overdose.”
It’s the fifth settlement negotiated by Marshall’s office to address the opioid crisis in Alabama.
The terms of the agreement require Walmart to pay $35.7 million to Alabama’s local governments to decrease opioid use.
Three million of that payment will go toward “improving the connectivity and integration of Alabama’s local court systems.”
“Our district and circuit courts have borne a great share of the burden of navigating this epidemic,” Marshall said. “After conversations with judges in some of the hardest-hit areas of our state, I was determined to recover funding for this effort.”
Though the state of Alabama was not a plaintiff in the case against Walmart, Marshall negotiated the agreement on the behalf of local entities that sued the company.
According to Marshall’s office, Marshall has sued seven opioid-related defendants and has finalized settlements valued at more than $300 million for the state and its local governments to fight the addiction crisis throughout the state.
Past Lawsuits
Walmart has faced several lawsuits in relation to its pharmacists filling prescriptions.In 2016, the Department of Justice (DOJ) launched an investigation into physicians writing opioid prescriptions it alleged Walmart pharmacists shouldn’t have filled.
Walmart sued the DOJ in October 2020 seeking clarity for its pharmacists in dispensing opioid prescriptions in response to the investigation.
“They are now threatening a completely unjustified lawsuit against Walmart, claiming in hindsight pharmacists should have refused to fill otherwise valid opioid prescriptions that were written by the very doctors that the federal government still approves to write prescriptions,” Walmart said in an October 2020
press release. “We are bringing this lawsuit because there is no federal law requiring pharmacists to interfere in the doctor-patient relationship to the degree DOJ is demanding, and in fact expert federal and state health agencies routinely say it is not allowed and potentially harmful to patients with legitimate medical needs.”
In December 2020, the DOJ filed a nationwide lawsuit against Walmart alleging the company unlawfully dispensed controlled substances from its pharmacies, violating the Controlled Substance Act.
“As one of the largest pharmacy chains and wholesale drug distributors in the country, Walmart had the responsibility and the means to help prevent the diversion of prescription opioids,” said Jeffrey Bossert Clark, the acting assistant attorney general of the civil division, in a
press release. “Instead, for years, it did the opposite — filling thousands of invalid prescriptions at its pharmacies and failing to report suspicious orders of opioids and other drugs placed by those pharmacies.”
Walmart
responded in December 2020 by stating the DOJ’s investigation leading up to the lawsuit “is tainted by historical ethics violations, and this lawsuit invents a legal theory that unlawfully forces pharmacists to come between patients and their doctors and is riddled with factual inaccuracies and cherry-picked documents taken out of context.”
“Blaming pharmacists for not second-guessing the very doctors the Drug Enforcement Administration 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 Epoch Times contacted Walmart and the DOJ for further information.
