Joe Brown, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas, and a team of employees including Heather Rattan, who has spent most of her career prosecuting drug cartels, began investigating Walmart in 2016. According to the evidence they gathered, Walmart pharmacists in Texas and other states reported hundreds of thousands of suspicious or inappropriate opioid prescriptions to their supervisors. They knew these opioids were being prescribed by pill mill doctors, and begged the corporate office to allow them to refuse to dispense such opioids. Some of the doctors had been banned from sending prescriptions to all of Walmart's major competitors.
Walmart corporate officials didn't take broad action in response to these claims at the time, even though some people who filled those prescriptions died from overdose. The company said it could not cut off a doctor entirely, and that each prescription must be evaluated individually, the Texas prosecutors found, Eisinger and Bandler report. Some doctors were only banned after prosecutors began investigation Walmart. But pharmacists in some states had limited power to block individual doctors because of protective measures by state boards of pharmacy and medical boards.
The company appeared primarily concerned with the profitability of such opioid prescriptions: "An opioid compliance manager told an executive in an email, gathered during the inquiry and viewed by ProPublica, that Walmart’s focus should be on 'driving sales," Eisinger and Bandler report.
It wasn't the first time Walmart had gotten in trouble for failing to vet opioid prescriptions; in 2011 the company entered into a secret settlement with the Drug Enforcement Administration in a similar case and promised to make greater efforts to curb improper opioid prescriptions filled through its stores, though it did not admit wrongdoing. The existence of that settlement has not been previously reported. "In addition, Walmart had repeatedly run afoul of the Controlled Substances Act. The company had received more than 50 'Letters of Admonition' from the DEA for its prescribing practices from 2000 to 2018, according to records obtained by ProPublica," Eisinger and Bandler report. "And it had paid two small Controlled Substances Act settlements in 2007 and 2008, one for filling unlawful prescriptions and the other for recordkeeping violations."
In early 2018, Rattan told Walmart she was going to indict the company for violating the Controlled Substances Act, an unheard of step against a Fortune 500 company, for failing to properly track and report suspicious opioid prescriptions to the DEA. But Walmart got high-ranking Trump appointees at the Department of Justice to intervene, and on August 31, 2018, the DOJ informed Walmart that it would decline to prosecute the company.
Walmart had admitted to mistakes and appeared open to a civil settlement, but they stopped cooperating with prosecutors in mid-2018. Through law firm Jones Day, which has deep ties throughout D.C., Walmart "added a Trumpian tactic: At a moment when the president had established a habit of attacking the investigators in his own government, the company followed a similarly aggressive approach," Eisinger and Bandler report. "Walmart lawyers complained to Washington about the Texas prosecutors, accusing them of seeking to 'embarrass' the company while using the threat of criminal charges to extort a larger civil fine. Criminal and civil investigations can run in parallel, but it’s an ethical violation for prosecutors to use the threat of criminal penalties to generate a higher civil settlement."
A Walmart lawyer also said in a letter to a DOJ official that criminally convicting Walmart could harm millions of senior citizens and low-income people who rely on federal programs for food and medicine, since a convicted corporation might not be allowed to participate in such programs anymore. As prosecutors continued to pursue the criminal case, Walmart exercised its PR and political muscle," Eisinger and Bandler report: in May 2018 the company announced it would limit first-time opioid prescriptions to no more than a seven-day supply.
The Texas prosecutors didn't give up, and in October 2018 met with the DEA's acting director Uttam Dhillon. After gaining a sympathetic ear from Dhillon, they all headed to the DOJ headquarters to meet with then-deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein. Rosenstein refused to revive the criminal case, and suggested that the team prosecute individual employees. But the DOJ blocked those indictments too, and Trump appointees in the DOJ consistently sided with Walmart when the team filed a civil case, Eisinger and Bandler report.
Walmart's pull in D.C. frustrated the Texas prosecutors so much that one resigned in protest in October 2019.
from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/33OgYrw Trump administration shielded Walmart from criminal prosecution over opioid prescriptions, investigation finds - Entrepreneur Generations
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