DOJ Alleges Rite Aid Drug Store Chain ‘Ignored Red Flags’ in Filling Opioid Prescriptions

While conservative politicians and pundits have pointed to illegal traffic across the US border as the cause behind snowballing opioid overdose deaths, health advocates have noted the US healthcare system, uniquely privatized and pay-to-play, encourages symptomatic treatments over preventative medicine, creating chronic painkiller dependencies.

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has opened a new lawsuit against pharmacy chain Rite Aid, claiming its shoddy safety practices have helped fuel the opioid epidemic.

“We allege that Rite Aid filled hundreds of thousands of prescriptions that did not meet legal requirements,” US Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said in a Tuesday statement, adding that “Rite Aid’s pharmacists repeatedly filled prescriptions for controlled substances with obvious red flags, and Rite Aid intentionally deleted internal notes about suspicious prescribers. These practices opened the floodgates for millions of opioid pills and other controlled substances to flow illegally out of Rite Aid’s stores.”

According to the complaint filed Monday in a federal court in Ohio, between May 2014 and June 2019, the drugstore company and its employees filled hundreds of thousands of prescriptions that were “medically unnecessary, lacked a medically accepted indication, or were not issued in the usual course of professional practice.”

The unlawful prescriptions included scripts for “trinities,” a dangerous combination of an opioid, benzodiazepine, and a muscle relaxant; “early fills” of fentanyl and oxycodone prescriptions before a prior prescription for the same drug had run out, “which is a clear sign of overutilization,” the filing notes; scripts for extremely high doses or quantities of opioids; and scripts written by people known to Rite Aid pharmacists as illegitimate.

“Rite Aid knew of its obligations under federal and state law to prevent the diversion of controlled substances and to refrain from filling unlawful prescriptions,” the DOJ said. “Nevertheless, Rite Aid pharmacists repeatedly filled prescriptions for controlled substances that had obvious, and often multiple, red flags indicating misuse related to the prescription itself, the prescriber, the customer, or a combination of factors. Rite Aid pharmacists ignored these red flags, making either no effort or a patently inadequate effort to resolve the red flags.”

The lawsuit comes after two of Rite Aid’s rival pharmacy chains, CVS Health and Walgreens, agreed to pay out some $10 billion to states, cities, and Native American tribes over 10 to 15 years to settle opioid lawsuits brought against them. Walmart also agreed to pay a $3.1 billion settlement last year, and drugmaker Teva agreed to a $4.25 billion settlement.

According to US National Institutes for Health (NIH) statistics, the US saw more than 106,000 deaths from drug overdoses in 2021, the most recent year for which there is data. At least 70,000 of those deaths were from synthetic opioids, the most prominent and infamous of which is fentanyl.

Last month, the White House boasted that thanks to major seizures of illegal shipments at the US-Mexico border, including 15,000 pounds of fentanyl, overdose deaths in the US had made a sizable impact on deaths in recent months.