Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced he was investigating allegations made against Walmart related to the opioid crisis. According to a Tuesday news release, the investigation is looking for “potential violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act (DTPA) relating to the promotion, sale, dispensing, and distribution of prescription opioids.”
“Walmart is required to report documentation of orders from January 2006 to the present to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and all Texas state agencies in Texas,” the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) wrote in the news release. “OAG is investigating whether Walmart improperly filled prescriptions for controlled substances and whether Walmart failed to report suspicious orders as required by law.”
Walmart said it would answer Paxton’s question, and that it was confident in its record on opioid safety. Walmart spokesperson Randy Hargrove added that the company’s pharmacists have refused to fill hundreds of thousands of potentially problematic opioid prescriptions.
“Walmart and our pharmacists are torn between the demands on pharmacists imposed by opioids plaintiffs on one side and health agencies and regulators on the other, and patients are caught in the middle,” Hargrove said.
The Texas investigation is tangentially related to a 2020 federal lawsuit against Walmart over alleged failures to report suspicious opioid orders. The lawsuit was put on hold late last year due to a separate Supreme Court case involving two doctors who were found guilty of misusing their medical licenses to fill thousands of prescriptions for addictive pain medications.
The Supreme Court decided that case on Monday, allowing the federal Walmart lawsuit to resume. That’s scheduled to happen July 11. Many of the examples used in the federal lawsuit involved Texas prescriptions.
“I have fought for Texans who have been tragically impacted by the illegal marketing and sale of opioids, which have caused addiction and the untimely deaths of thousands of people each year,” Paxton said in a statement. “I am committed to holding pharmacies accountable if they played a role in this devastating epidemic.”
Reuters contributed to this report.
