By Jonathan Stempel
Aug 28 (Reuters) – Walmart will pay $50 million to settle a U.S. government lawsuit accusing the nation’s largest retailer of fueling a nationwide opioid epidemic by unlawfully dispensing prescriptions from its pharmacies, the Department of Justice said on Friday.
The payout is far less than the billions of dollars in civil penalties that the Justice Department had said Walmart could owe when the lawsuit began in December 2020, near the end of President Donald Trump’s first White House term.
Walmart did not admit liability, and in a regulatory filing called the settlement amount “immaterial.” Net income for the Bentonville, Arkansas-based company totaled $11.7 billion in the six months ending on July 31.
The Justice Department had accused Walmart of having repeatedly violated the federal Controlled Substances Act since 2013 by missing “red flags” as it failed to track and report suspicious opioid prescriptions.
It said some Walmart compliance officials knew that some prescribers operated as “pill mills” but filled prescriptions for them anyway.
The lawsuit had been one of the Justice Department’s most significant cases against a single company over the opioid epidemic.
Walmart’s settlement also calls for tighter oversight of pharmacists, and a hotline for employees and patients to report suspected illegal dispensing of the painkillers.
“Today’s settlement proves this department is committed to putting Americans’ flourishing first,” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said in a statement.
In 2022, Walmart agreed to pay $3.1 billion to settle thousands of lawsuits by state and local governments over its pharmacies’ role in the opioid crisis. CVS and Walgreens reached similar, larger settlements.
JUDGE NARROWED LAWSUIT
More than 905,000 people in the U.S. died from opioid overdoses between 1999 and 2025, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Annual deaths began declining after 2022, the agency said.
Walmart said in a statement: “We are pleased to resolve this matter and will continue supporting the exceptional work our pharmacists do every day to provide outstanding patient care.”
A joint stipulation dismissing the case was filed on Thursday in the federal court in Wilmington, Delaware.
Walmart shares closed up 46 cents at $103.09.
Other companies targeted over opioids included Purdue Pharma, which pleaded guilty to criminal charges in 2020 related to its painkiller OxyContin after filing for bankruptcy protection, and the drug wholesaler Cencora, formerly known as AmerisourceBergen.
In March 2024, U.S. District Judge Colm Connolly narrowed the Walmart case, dismissing claims that Walmart failed to report suspicious prescriptions to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, and that Walmart pharmacists failed to document red flags associated with prescriptions.
Connolly let the government pursue a claim that pharmacists dispensed prescriptions that Walmart compliance personnel knew were invalid. A fourth claim, that pharmacists dispensed prescriptions they knew were invalid, also remained pending.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York and Andrew Goudsward in Washington, D.C.; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama, Deepa Babington, Elaine Hardcastle, Cynthia Osterman and David Gregorio)
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