Tennessee Sues Walgreens Over Opioid Crisis

Tennessee Sues Walgreens Over Opioid Crisis

Introduction

Tennessee state's attorney general said on Wednesday that he has filed a lawsuit against Walgreens, claiming that the pharmacy giant failed to maintain adequate safeguards against the misuse of prescription painkillers, which contributed to the state's opioid problem.

The Tennessee Consumer Protection Act is allegedly violated in the case filed in Knox County Circuit Court asking for unspecified monetary fines. According to the complaint, more than 1.1 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone tablets were distributed by Tennessee-based Walgreens retail shops between 2006 and 2020. Over that time, a single pharmacy in Jamestown alone supplied enough opioids to provide each person with 2,104 doses.

According to a statement from the attorney general, Walgreens did not accidentally oversupply the state of Tennessee with opioids. Instead, business actions made by Walgreens were the consequence of knowing or wilfully uninformed ignorance, which contributed gasoline to the flames of the opioid pandemic. Walgreens failed to recognize and stop the misuse and diversion of hazardous opioids while ignoring many warning signs.

Walgreens declared in a statement on Wednesday night that it never produced, marketed, or provided opioids to the pain clinics and pill factories that sparked this problem. The business will keep fighting back against the unfounded criticisms of pharmacists' professionalism as committed healthcare providers who reside in the neighborhoods they serve.

According to the lawsuit, Walgreens caused a public nuisance and for years neglected to exercise due diligence or instruct its pharmacists on how to spot red flags of opiate misuse and diversion. The lawsuit even stated that the people from at least 31 different states received opioid prescriptions from Tennessee Walgreens locations.

Tennessee Walgreens pharmacies filled 103,000 prescriptions for medications from a Germantown obstetrician between June 2013 and March 2014. According to the lawsuit, over 20% of those were for out-of-state patients.

Numerous opiate prescriptions for kids as young as two years old were filled by Walgreens. According to the complaint, a dentist in Erin issued a prescription that was 2.5 times the maximum daily opioid amount advised for an adult.

Nearly the past 20 years, over 500,000 fatalities in the United States have been directly attributed to the epidemic of opioid addiction and overdose.

More than 3,000 lawsuits concerning the opioid crisis have been brought in state and federal courts by state and local governments, Native American tribes, unions, hospitals, and other organizations.

Early this year, the pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson completed a $5 billion nationwide settlement. A $21 billion agreement was concluded by national medication delivery companies AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health, and McKesson. Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, is pleading with a judge to approve a package that may involve up to $6 billion from Sackler family members.