(Gray News) – Walmart has agreed to pay $50 million to the federal government to resolve allegations that its pharmacies across the country illegally filled thousands of invalid prescriptions for opioids and other controlled substances, in violation of the Controlled Substances Act.

The settlement, announced by the U.S. Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), caps a years-long civil case that accused Walmart of ignoring glaring red flags about dangerous prescriptions while prioritizing sales and patient volume.

The company has not admitted liability, and the government’s claims remain allegations.

The government’s lawsuit, originally filed in December 2020 and amended in 2022 in federal court in Delaware, claims Walmart violated the Controlled Substances Act starting in June 2013.

According to federal prosecutors:

• Walmart’s own pharmacists repeatedly warned the company’s corporate compliance team about certain prescribers they believed were operating as “pill mills” — medical practices that churn out high volumes of opioid prescriptions with little medical justification.
• Those warnings came through “refusal-to-fill” forms and other internal reports, documenting concerns about specific prescribers and prescriptions.
• Despite those reports, members of Walmart’s compliance team allegedly continued to allow prescriptions from those prescribers to be filled, and “prioritized other goals over CSA compliance.”

In one internal email cited by the government, a compliance director acknowledged that instead of digging into refusal-to-fill reports, the team saw “[d]riving sales and patient awareness” as “a far better use of our Market Directors and Market manger’s time.”

Federal officials also say individual Walmart pharmacists filled prescriptions they knew or should have known were invalid. Those prescriptions allegedly had obvious red flags, including:

• Prescriptions from prescribers already known as “pill mills”
• Dangerous combinations of opioids and other drugs
• “Cocktails” of opioids and non-opioids frequently abused together
• Excessively repeated high-dose opioid prescriptions
• Repeated early refill requests for controlled substances

Prosecutors argue that, taken together, those factors indicated prescriptions that should have been questioned or refused under federal law.

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