West Virginia sues Walgreens, Rite-Aid for flooding their pharmacies with painkillers

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — Rite-Aid RAD, -0.21% and Walgreens WBA, +2.60% failed to monitor and report suspicious orders of prescription painkillers in West Virginia while inundating their retail pharmacies with tens of millions of pills, according to a state lawsuit.

The lawsuit filed by Attorney General Patrick Morrisey alleges violations of the state’s Consumer Credit and Protection Act and conduct that caused a public nuisance. It said the company’s individual state pharmacies also had to buy pills from other distributors to keep up with demand.

West Virginia has by far the highest death rate from prescription overdoses. Nationally, the drug crisis has resulted in more than 430,000 deaths since 2000.

Morrisey said Rite-Aid and Walgreens were among the state’s top 10 opioid distributors from 2006 to 2014. Rite-Aid distributed the equivalent of more than 87 million oxycodone pills and its retail pharmacies ordered another 127.5 million pills from other distributors to fulfill demand, the lawsuit said. That’s about 119 pills for every resident in the state of 1.8 million people.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/west-virginia-sues-walgreens-rite-aid-over-painkillers-flood-2020-06-05?siteid=yhoof2&yptr=yahoo

[msongs]

1. they gonna arrrest all the doctors who wrote the prescriptions? nt

[abqtommy]

2. I sure hope so!

[ProfessorGAC]

3. No, But They Should

The pharmacist is in no legal position to refuse to fill a prescription. Remember the "birth control is against my religion" druggists? They got told they had no legal standing and fill the doctors' scrip or find another line of work. (Well, in most states)
It's the pill pushing doctors that are the root cause.

[Staph]

4. WV AG Morrissey is up for reelection.

When first elected in 2008, he promised to serve only two terms. And he has had terrible feedback for settling lawsuits with drug companies for small amounts of money, relatively speaking.

From his Wikipedia entry:

From 2004 to 2012, Morrisey worked as a lobbyist in Washington D.C. He worked for the corporate law firm Sidley Austin before he joined King & Spalding in 2010, becoming a partner. As a lobbyist, he was viewed as an expert on health and drug-related regulations and legislation. He was paid $250,000 to lobby on behalf of a pharmaceutical trade group. The group was funded by some of the same opioid distributors that West Virginia sued for flooding the state with opioids.

This is merely an election ploy.