Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced on Tuesday that he is looking into Walmart’s opioid sales to see if the retail behemoth filled prescriptions incorrectly, Fox News informed.
According to a press statement from his office, Paxton sent Walmart a civic investigative demand for alleged violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
The CID has to do with the advertisement, marketing, distribution, and dispensing of prescription opioids.
According to a press statement from Paxton, he said that has battled for Texans who have tragically been harmed by the illicit marketing and the sale of opioids, which have created addiction and caused premature deaths of thousands of people each year.
He also said that he pledged to hold all of the pharmacies responsible if they were ever involved in what he called a “devastating epidemic.”
The probe will focus on Walmart’s compliance with providing the Drug Enforcement Administration as well as state agencies with documents pertaining to opioid orders which date back to January 2006.
In a statement for Fox News, Walmart said that it has “never manufactured, sold, or promoted any opioids, and that pharmacists are not doctors and do not write opioid prescriptions.”
The statement read, that they are confident in their track record of fighting the crisis with opioids, and that they are proud of their pharmacists who educate patients about the risks associated with opioid prescriptions and have turned down hundreds of thousands of opioid prescriptions they believed might pose a problem.
“Many health authorities, including the Texas Medical Board, medical associations, physicians, and patients have expressed concern over Walmart’s decision to refuse to fill opioid prescriptions. Some have even claimed that Walmart is improperly interfering with the doctor-patient relationship by doing so.
Patients are caught in the center of Walmart’s and our pharmacists’ conflict between demands placed on them by opioids claimants on the one hand and health organizations and regulators on the other.”
Walmart was sued by the federal government in 2020 for contributing to the country’s opioid crisis.
In a complaint filed by the Justice Department, Walmart was accused of trying to increase profits by understaffing their pharmacies and forcing staff members to fill prescriptions rapidly.
According to the lawsuit, this made it challenging for pharmacists to refuse bogus prescriptions, which encouraged rampant drug addiction across the country.
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