Reuters
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The U.S. Department of Justice announced a lawsuit Wednesday accusing pharmacy chain CVS of writing illegal opioid prescriptions and billing government health insurance programs, contributing to a nationwide epidemic of opioid addiction and overdoses.

The recently unsealed lawsuit filed in federal court in Providence, Rhode Island, alleges that from October 2013 to the present, CVS violated the federal Controlled Substances Act by writing prescriptions for dangerous amounts of opioids and dangerous drug combinations.

It said the company regularly filled prescriptions from doctors who ran so-called pill mills and dispensed large quantities of opioids without a legitimate medical reason.

The Justice Department said the violations stemmed from company-mandated performance metrics that led to warning signs being ignored and that, in some cases, patients died of overdoses shortly after filling illegal prescriptions.

“We have cooperated with the DOJ’s investigation for more than four years and strongly disagree with the allegations and misrepresentation in this complaint,” CVS said in a statement.

CVS agreed in 2022 to pay nearly $5 billion over 10 years to settle thousands of similar claims from state, local and Native American tribal governments. The company did not admit wrongdoing in the deal, which was part of a series of nationwide settlements between pharmacies, drugmakers and distributors totaling about $46 billion.

The Justice Department’s lawsuit, unsealed Wednesday, began with a whistleblower complaint from a former CVS employee.

According to the lawsuit, CVS was understaffed, pressured its pharmacists to fill prescriptions as quickly as possible without checking whether they were legitimate, and ignored warnings from its own employees.

“Safety issues arise when you’re dealing with medications while rushing to fill an order like at McDonald’s,” one employee allegedly wrote. “CVS has developed an assembly line style of drug preparation and only cares about profits.”

The company continued to fill hundreds of prescriptions for an Alabama doctor even after several internal memos in 2015 indicated he was under investigation, the complaint says. This doctor was arrested in 2016.

It filled thousands of prescriptions for a Pennsylvania doctor despite internal warnings and online patient reviews saying he “wrote scripts without seeing the patient” and was “a pill pusher and a drunk,” the Justice Department said.

The complaint described 10 individual patients who allegedly died after filling illegal prescriptions for opioids and other medications at CVS.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 800,000 people in the United States died from opioid overdoses between 1999 and 2023. Preliminary data shows that the number of overdoses has decreased over the past year.