WILMINGTON, Del. (Legal Newsline) - Walmart recently scored a big win in a lawsuit brought by the federal government that attempts to blame the retail giant for the nation's addiction crisis.
Delaware federal judge Colm Connolly on March 11 granted key parts of Walmart's motion to dismiss the lawsuit, which claimed Walmart pharmacists should have noticed and reported possibly improper prescription practices concerning opioids.
In 2022, Walmart had argued a U.S. Supreme Court decision that reversed the conviction of a doctor for writing invalid opioid prescriptions gutted the Department of Justice's case against it.
In that decision, the majority ruled that the federal Controlled Substances Act contains a provision requiring prosecutors to prove guilty knowledge, not just that a doctor violated professional standards by writing opioid prescriptions.
Connolly rejected the idea Walmart violated a "CSA-imposed reporting obligation" on suspicious orders to the Drug and Enforcement Agency. The CSA only empowered the U.S. attorney general to promulgate regulations, it did not require he or she to do so.
"It necessarily follows that the reporting requirements... were not 'required under' the CSA," Connolly wrote. "Thus, a failure to comply with the reporting requirements... during the Distribution Violations Period was not unlawful... and did not trigger civil penalties..."
He also rejected the idea Walmart's pharmacists strayed from the usual course of their professional practice when filling opioid requests.
"This liability theory trips right out of the gate," Connolly wrote, adding pharmacists could only violate the two pertinent laws if he or she dispenses a controlled substance without a prescription.
The third claim he dismissed argued Walmart violated certain laws by knowingly dispensing controlled substances pursuant to prescriptions that were not issued in the usual course of treatment or for a legitimate medical purpose.
Citing a 1918 decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Connolly wrote "at least in some circumstances, the knowledge of a corporation's employee cannot be aggregated with the act of another employee to impose liability on the corporation for recklessly, willfully, intentionally, purposefully, or with ulterior motive engaging in a prohibited act."
The DOJ filed its 160-page complaint in 2020, and the case was stayed while the Supreme Court addressed two others that would impact it. The government’s lawsuit doesn’t accuse Walmart of filling any prescriptions by unlicensed doctors, and Walmart called the case a misguided attempt to turn its pharmacists into “DEA’s own `doctor police.’”