CVS Deliberately Dispensed ‘Huge’ Volumes of Invalid Opioid Prescriptions: DOJ Lawsuit

The largest drugstore chain in America is accused of “illegally dispensing massive amounts of opioids and other controlled substances to fuel its own profits at the expense of public health and safety,” according to a civil lawsuit filed by the Justice Department that was unsealed Wednesday.

The DOJ lawsuit alleges that for more than a decade, CVS knowingly filled sometimes questionable prescriptions for controlled substances that lacked a legitimate medical purpose or were not valid.

Those prescriptions included “dangerous and excessive amounts of opioids” and “trinity cocktails” — a mixture of “particularly dangerous and abused combination drugs consisting of an opioid, a benzodiazepine and a muscle relaxant,” the suit said.

The suit also accuses the company of filling “at least thousands of prescriptions for controlled substances” written by “known ‘pill mills’.”

In a statement to ABC News, CVS spokeswoman Amy Thibault called the suit “misleading” and said company officials “strongly disagree with the allegations and false narrative” described in the DOJ case and will “vigorously defend ourselves.”

The DOJ’s lawsuit says CVS “contributed to the opioid crisis, a national public health emergency with devastating consequences in the United States.” The suit went on to say, “These included illegitimate prescriptions of extremely high doses and excessive amounts of potent opioids that fueled dependence and addiction, as well as illegitimate prescriptions of dangerous combinations of opioids and other drugs.”

The lawsuit accuses CVS of sometimes ignoring “scary red flags” about prescriptions “that bear the hallmarks of abuse and diversion.” The lawsuit points to performance metrics and incentive compensation policies that allegedly pressured pharmacists to “fill prescriptions as quickly as possible without assessing their legitimacy” and company policies that allegedly prioritized speed over safety.

The suit alleges that CVS refused to implement compliance measures recommended by its own experts to reduce the number of invalid red-flag prescriptions “primarily because of fears that they would slow the speed of prescription filling and increase labor costs,” according to the suit.

The government is seeking civil penalties, injunctions and damages to address what it called CVS’s unlawful practices and to prevent future violations.

In his statement, Thibault, the CVS spokesman, said the company has been an industry leader in the fight against opioid abuse.

“Each of the prescriptions in question was for an FDA-approved opioid medication prescribed by a practitioner that the government itself has approved, approved and authorized to write controlled substance prescriptions,” Thibault’s statement said.

She said the DOJ case “intensifies a serious dilemma for pharmacists who are simultaneously wary of dispensing too many opioids and too few.”