US sues Rite Aid for repeated illegal prescriptions of opioids

One of the nation’s largest pharmacy chains helped fuel the deadly opioid epidemic by illegally filling hundreds of thousands of controlled substance prescriptions, the Justice Department said in a high-profile lawsuit.

In a complaint filed Monday in Cleveland federal court, a federal agency accused Rite Aid of repeatedly issuing illegal prescription combinations known as “trinties” that include “excessive amounts of opioids such as oxycodone and fentanyl” between May 2014 and June. 2019.

“The Justice Department is using every tool at our disposal to fight the opioid epidemic that is killing Americans and devastating communities across the country,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.


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The pharmacists who worked at Rite Aid were practicing with obvious red flags, Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta said.
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Pharmacists who worked at Rite Aid, which has more than 2,330 stores in 17 states, were running the practice with obvious red flags, and the company deliberately removed internal notes about suspicious prescribers, according to Deputy Attorney General Vanita Gupta.

“This practice opened the floodgates for millions of opioid pills and other controlled substances that illegally leaked out of Rite Aid stores,” Gupta said.

The complaint stated that the prescriptions lacked a legitimate medical purpose, or were not accepted for medical reasons, or did not conform to standard professional practice.

For example, the company has removed some internal warnings from pharmacists about suspicious prescribers, including “pills cash only???”, “overdosing.”[s] for oxycodone” and even directly “DO NOT FILL THE CONTROL”. according to The Guardian.

Rite Aid declined to comment when The Post reported on Tuesday.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drug overdoses caused more than 500,000 deaths in the United States between 1999 and 2020, with more than 90,000 deaths reported in 2020 alone.


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The complaint stated that the prescriptions lacked a legitimate medical purpose, or were not accepted for medical reasons, or did not conform to standard professional practice.
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The Justice Department charged Rite Aid with violating the federal False Claims Act by making false claims about prescriptions to state health programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.

He joined a whistleblowing lawsuit filed in 2019 by two pharmacists and a pharmacist at Rite Aid stores in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and West Virginia.

Andrew White, Mark Rosenberg, and Ann Weguelin filed a lawsuit against the network in October 2019, alleging that the company pressured pharmacists to fill prescriptions quickly without doing proper research “red flags,” which could include studying a doctor who prescribes a large the number of drugs. The Guardian reports.

“Rite Aid violated these obligations by distributing extremely large quantities of opioids at its retail pharmacies throughout the United States,” the lawsuit states. “Pharmacy serves as the last line of defense between dangerous opioids and the public.”

In addition to Rite Aid, the Justice Department has also sued Walmart and drug distributor AmerisourceBergen Corp for their alleged contributions to the national opioid crisis.

With mail wires

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