To two Ohio counties. The precedent is a bit mind-boggling. There's a lot of counties in this country. 2 Ohio counties awarded $650M from pharmacies in opioids suit.
I don't know the particular facts of this case, but if you read Patrick Radden Keefe's Empire of Pain, many of the chain grocers, especially Walgreens, were well aware of the anomalous statistics of inexplicable opioid sales and knew what was happening in terms of abuse, but sought to profit from it. There were tragically some pharmacies in small towns that attempted to stop stocking opiates because they kept getting broken into. Purdue threatened to sue them if they did not carry Oxycodone
If I ever heard a white collar crime deserving the death penalty, it’s this. Magnitudes worse than Bernie Madoff, and dozens if not hundreds of people were culpable in mass suffering while raking in many millions (and in some cases billions).
In some cases they have… edit: I just did the math… that’s over 8 pills a day for 4 years for each of those 9 people. That is crazy. “Romano only accepted cash—$750 for an initial prescription and $120 for subsequent monthly prescriptions. The evidence offered at trial demonstrated that the prescriptions Romano issued for opioids and other controlled substances greatly exceeded recommended dosages and were in dangerous, life-threatening combinations which served to fuel the addiction of his clients. According to evidence introduced at trial, between January 2015 and June 2019, Romano prescribed over 111,000 pills, including opioids, benzodiazepines, and muscle relaxants, to nine of his clients.” Pain Management Physician Convicted of Unlawfully Distributing Opioids
They are but pharmacists see the prescriptions coming in, who's getting them and how often. They are in the best position to intervene. My mom was a pharmacist for almost 40 years (UF Pharmacy grad of course) and she put a couple of doctor's out of business for for prescribing shitloads of Percocet to young patients. FYI, Percocet was one of the first pain killers to contain oxycodone. One of those doctors was later murdered by a patient needing a "refill."
