© Provided by Washington Examiner Earlier this month, a federal judge kept alive a horribly misguided complaint by the Department of Justice against Walmart for doing nothing other than its duty in filling prescriptions from doctors in good standing.
The lawsuit involves prescriptions for legal opioid medicines. Yes, as reported just last week, opioid overdoses grew by 29% in 2020, making opioid misuse a scourge that probably requires a national health strategy to counteract. But the Justice Department's civil suit against Walmart is mere virtue-signaling - indeed, it is counterproductive virtue-signaling at that. The real problem lies not with pharmacists but with doctors who overprescribe, users who abuse, and street traders who profit from an opioid black market.
The Justice Department's civil suit is quite strange. It says Walmart "failed to detect and report at least hundreds of thousands of suspicious orders" of legal prescription painkillers.
Suspicious? Says who? The prescriptions at issue were written by doctors who are duly registered with the Drug Enforcement Administration and licensed by their states. Pharmacists are governed mostly by state laws. In most states, pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions from duly certified doctors are subject to sanction. No federal law provides a clear rule on when or whether pharmacists should disregard their ordinary duty to fill prescriptions. They provide only vague guidance for how pharmacists are to determine whether "red flags" exist that indicate that doctors have turned their practices into illegal pill mills.
Moreover, Walmart has actually been rather aggressive in trying to detect suspicious prescription activity. The popular store's pharmacies have refused to fill problematic opioid prescriptions on hundreds of thousands of occasions in recent years. In fact, Walmart locations in 13 states have been subject to precisely the opposite complaints from what the Justice Department claims. In those 13 states, pharmacy boards are investigating or charging Walmart for refusing to fill prescriptions. Pharmacies can and do lose licenses for failing to fill valid prescriptions.
In sum, the retail giant is quite literally damned if it does and damned if it doesn't fill opioid prescriptions.
To paraphrase what some others have said about this case, the Justice Department's complaint involves lawyers second-guessing pharmacists for not questioning doctors and patients whom the federal authorities have not previously second-guessed.
Remember, pharmacists don't have medical degrees, nor have they examined the patients. Their job - a job they can be punished for not doing - is to make sure they provide the right amount of the right medicine to the right patients according to instructions from properly licensed physicians. Neither law nor logic requires them to put themselves between doctors and patients as some sort of all-knowing arbiter of whether legal medicines are being abused.
And it bears repeating that these are legal medicines. Tens of millions of people every year have their lives immeasurably improved by the pain relief provided by opioid-containing medicines correctly prescribed by careful physicians. As bad as the crisis of opioid misuse and abuse may be, far more people, including patients post-surgery, those suffering from cancer, and others, rely on such medicines in the right doses and without abuse or addiction to make their pain and their very lives bearable.
Walmart had filed suit to block the federal authorities from continuing their massive civil complaint against the company. But late on Feb. 4, Texas-based Judge Sean Jordan dismissed Walmart's defensive suit. This leaves the company in the Justice Department's crosshairs - and in the crossfire between state sanctions for filling too few prescriptions and federal punishment for filling too many.
The company is appealing Jordan's ruling, but it should not need to do so. The Justice Department's position is meritless and absurd. It should withdraw its complaint.
Tags: Editorials, Walmart, opioid crisis, Justice Department, Pharmaceutical Industry, Doctors
Original Author: Washington Examiner
Original Location: DOJ suit against Walmart is wrong prescription for curing opioid epidemic