Prescription drug abuse is a serious problem in our nation. In your average month, just short of half of all Americans use a prescription drug — much of it not legal. Unfortunately, a Biden-era lawsuit by the Department of Justice targets not the Big Pharma companies that caused this abuse, but instead the pharmacies that simply followed doctors’ orders.
And instead of abandoning this waste of taxpayer money, the Trump administration seems to be doubling down.
The volume of prescription drug abuse is enormous. The non-profit organization Drug Abuse Statistics estimates that 16.3 million people misuse prescriptions in a year, with 22.6% of them, or 3.7 million people, misusing prescriptions for the first time. In the universe of first-time abusers, 43.3% use painkillers and 32.1% use sedatives or tranquilizers. Prescription drug abusers account for 5.76% of Americans over age 12, and prescription drugs rank third—after marijuana and before cocaine—among the most commonly abused substances. There is no debate that our nation has a serious problem with prescription drugs.
When there clearly are legitimate targets for reform, pharmacies have become an easy target of criticism and lawsuits, and no matter what, they can’t win. If they fill large prescriptions, they get sued. If they refuse to fill large prescriptions, they get sued. The New York Times reported on November 23, 2021, that Walmart, Walgreens and CVS are being sued for filling too many opioid prescriptions. The Pain News Network reported on May 12, 2022, that CVS was sued because a pharmacist refused to fill a prescription 30 times because the doses exceeded a 2016 opioid guideline issued by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
It’s a no-win situation. And now America’s largest law agency is targeting the nation’s largest pharmacies. The Biden DOJ, on December 18, 2024, announced “in a civil complaint unsealed today in Providence, Rhode Island, the Justice Department alleges that CVS Pharmacy Inc. and various subsidiaries (collectively, CVS) filled unlawful prescriptions in violation of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) and sought reimbursement from federal healthcare programs for unlawful prescriptions in violation of the False Claims Act (FCA).”
The lawsuit notes that CVS is the nation’s largest pharmacy chain, with over 9,000 pharmacies across the country. And starting in 2012, CVS implemented policies at all of those pharmacies to de-incentivize opioid distribution and consistently implemented new controls ever since. One of those policies was that it stopped recognizing prescriptions for controlled substances when one was issued by a telehealth startup.
This new lawsuit seems like an effort to place blame on the company rather than the real drivers of the opioid crisis: the drug companies that created the drugs and flooded the country with them.
The result of this Biden Administration lawsuit will create a culture of fear in pharmacists and remove their ability for decision-making when presented with a prescription. If you have been to a CVS, as I have, you witness lines at all hours for people wanting to fill prescriptions, putting a great deal of pressure on the staff to conduct business. To lay blame on the pharmacists, and company policy, will result in greater costs to consumers and fear of legal action no matter which way pharmacists go on filling prescription drugs.
Politicians and government officials are desperate to take action, any action, that is perceived to attack the prescription drug abuse epidemic. The problem is that the actions currently being taken to sue one company for filling prescriptions is misplaced.
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