America’s Biggest Big-Box Retailer Accused of Aiding Pill Mills

As healthcare fraud and healthcare-based criminal law attorneys, we at Chapman Law Group find Walmart’s response interesting:

“This lawsuit invents a legal theory that unlawfully forces pharmacists to come between patients and their doctors, and is riddled with factual inaccuracies and cherry-picked documents taken out of context. Blaming pharmacists for not second-guessing the very doctors the Drug Enforcement Administration approved to prescribe opioids is a transparent attempt to shift blame from DEA’s well-documented failures in keeping bad doctors from prescribing opioids in the first place.”

Why do we say this is interesting? Because it actually points to a deeper issue: not bad doctors, but bad policy.

The controversial CDC guidelines for prescribing controlled substances are usurping federal criminal standards and state regulatory standards. This means doctors who want to do the right thing by their patient are limited. As Ronald W. Chapman II, chair of Chapman Law Group’s White Collar Defense & Government Investigations practice group, explained in one of our recent articles:

“[W]e’re seeing in more recent cases, prosecutions are data driven. Prosecutions are initiated before an investigator has even looked at a medical record, before an investigator has even interviewed a patient. And in many cases, even though patients are clearly suffering from severe medical issues, the fact that a patient may have exhibited some signs of diversion or may have had a prior history of diversion is enough for federal prosecutors to move forward and indict that doctor.

“Instead of looking for signs of outright criminal behavior, these agencies are relying on signs of malpractice. Yet, without a deeper patient-by-patient investigation to analyze the context of a prescription pattern, a doctor’s behavior might not actually be malpractice at all.”