The thousands of opioid lawsuits pending before courts have largely focused on the roles played by prescription painkiller manufacturers and drug distributors to fuel the opioid crisis. Now, a new legal front has opened against large pharmacy chains such as CVS, Rite Aid, Walgreens and Walmart, which had previously eluded scrutiny. The new filings, made by two Ohio counties, assert that pharmacies are also liable because they distributed tens of millions of pills to patients and contributed to the deaths of more than 400,000 people over the past two decades.
The pharmacy chains rarely sounded alarms as a tidal wave of pills landed in small communities, including Ohio’s Lake County, which received nearly 64 million doses of oxycodone and hydrocodone, or about 290 pills for every man, woman and child.
The drug stores, it is alleged, also dragged their feet in setting up monitoring protocols at regional distribution centers, and rewarded pharmacists for churning volume rapidly and never refusing a doctors request. Thousands of opioid-related lawsuits are wending their way through the courts, and these new allegations shed light on how pharmacies must also be held accountable for the suffering and death caused by the epidemic. Meanwhile, the New York Times explores the long and winding road that led to the first FDA-approved, CBD-based drug for a rare form of epilepsy, and how that also spawned a booming market for bogus products with CBD, the non-psychoactive component of marijuana.
While the epilepsy drug was deemed safe and effective, CBD companies used that certification to tout all kinds of fake products and make fraudulent claims that CBD is a cure-all wonder drug—without any scientific validation. And finally, public health officials say they are worried about the growing number of people who are smoking pot while under lockdown to ease anxiety. In fact, smoking or vaping marijuana could leave consumers with irritated, inflamed lungs—and perhaps raise their risk of severe complications if they catch Covi-19. Doctors also suggest people ignore patently false claims that marijuana could ward off the coronva virus.