Attorney General Herbert H. Slatery III filed the lawsuit in Knox County Circuit Court, seeking unspecified civil penalties for violations of Tennessee's Consumer Protection Act.
According to the lawsuit, Walgreens retail stores in Tennessee dispensed more than 1.1 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pills between 2006 and 2020. During that time, one pharmacy in Jamestown alone dispensed enough opioids to supply each resident with 2,104 pills.
Slatery stated in a statement that Walgreens did not flood the state of Tennessee with opioids by accident. Rather, the fuel added to the fire of the opioid epidemic by Walgreens was the result of deliberate or willfully ignorant corporate decisions. Walgreens ignored numerous red flags and failed to detect and prevent dangerous narcotics abuse and diversion.
Walgreens said in a statement late Wednesday that it "never manufactured or marketed opioids, nor did we distribute them to the pain clinics and pill mills that fueled this crisis."
We will continue to defend the professionalism of our pharmacists, who are dedicated healthcare professionals who live in the communities they serve.
According to the lawsuit, Walgreens created a public nuisance by failing to perform due diligence or train its pharmacists on how to recognize suspicious activity for opioid abuse and diversion for years. According to the lawsuit, Tennessee Walgreens pharmacies provided opioids to patients from at least 31 different states.
Walgreens pharmacies in Tennessee dispensed 103,000 pills prescribed by an obstetrician in Germantown between June 2013 and March 2014. According to the lawsuit, nearly 20% of those were for out-of-state patients.
Walgreens filled a large number of opioid prescriptions for children as young as two years old. According to the lawsuit, a dentist in Erin wrote such a prescription that was 2.5 times the recommended maximum daily dose of opioids for an adult.
Over the last two decades, the opioid addiction and overdose epidemic has been linked to over 500,000 deaths in the United States.
More than 3,000 lawsuits involving the opioid epidemic have been filed in state and federal courts by state and local governments, Native American tribes, unions, hospitals, and other entities.
Johnson & Johnson reached a $5 billion nationwide settlement earlier this year. AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health, and McKesson have reached an agreement worth $21 billion. Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, is attempting to persuade a court to allow it to proceed with a deal that could include up to $6 billion from members of the Sackler family.