Washington (AFP)

Despite Walmart's attempts to ignite a backfire, American justice has decided to sue the distribution giant, accusing it of fueling the opioid crisis which has left hundreds of thousands of deaths in the United States. .

The Ministry of Justice calls for "civil sanctions which could amount to billions of dollars," he said in a statement.

According to him, Walmart illegally distributed normally controlled substances in pharmacies the group operates across the United States and "illegally distributed controlled and prescription substances at the height of the opioid crisis."

"As one of the largest drugstore chains and drug distributors in the country, Walmart had the responsibility and the means to help prevent opioid diversion," said Jeffrey Bossert Clark, Acting Deputy Attorney General cited in the press release.

"Instead, for years, he has done the opposite: accepting thousands of invalid prescriptions in his pharmacies and failing to report suspicious prescriptions for opiates," he added, stressing that "this behavior illegal has contributed to the opioid abuse epidemic across the United States. "

Asked by AFP, Walmart had not yet reacted.

Addiction to opioid drugs killed more than 400,000 people in the United States between 1999 and 2018.

Their consumption exploded from 2013, leading President Donald Trump to declare a "public health emergency" in 2017.

This crisis was even considered responsible for the drop in life expectancy in the United States between 2014 and 2017.

- "Wear the hat" -

The justice announcement comes two months to the day after Walmart filed a lawsuit in Texas court.

The group then claimed to be the victim of an unjust attempt by the government to make it "wear the hat" for the overuse of ultra-addictive opiate drugs.

In its complaint, the supermarket chain - which has some 5,000 stores in the United States, with almost all pharmacy points - estimated that by criticizing its pharmacists for not having refused to provide opiates prescribed by doctors, the ministry Justice and the US drug regulatory agency DEA put pharmacists "in an untenable position."

Driven by aggressive marketing from pharmaceutical companies, especially to doctors, the prescription of opioid pain-relieving drugs, until then reserved for serious illnesses, exploded in the late 1990s.

Walmart accuses the DEA of seeking to clear itself of its "deep mistakes" in the management of this crisis: audits have in fact concluded that the federal agency had not, as it should have, prevented the laboratories from producing quantities increasingly important of these drugs nor, in 70% of cases, withdrawn their license to doctors whose prescriptions were in question.

According to the complaint, the ministry and the DEA are bitter against Walmart, spending for several years considerable sums on an investigation which, failing to lead to criminal proceedings, would now aim to extract substantial civil damages from it.

The group asked the Texas court to make it clear that the group and its pharmacists did not have the legal responsibilities the government and the DEA would want them to have.

For now, this complaint has not been successful.

Other major US drug distributors - like Cardinal Health or McKesson - have been sued in the past by local or state authorities, who accuse them of turning a blind eye to millions of prescriptions for opioid drugs at the time. that they knew they were addicting.

An amicable settlement was found between three distributors and two counties in Ohio in October 2019.

© 2020 AFP