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A federal judge ruled this week that Walgreens can be held liable for contributing to San Francisco’s opioid crisis.
U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer on Wednesday upheld a city attorney’s claim that the pharmacy chain failed to exercise adequate oversight of prescriptions, including over-dispensing addictive substances and failing to report orders suspicious
“Walgreens pharmacies in San Francisco dispensed hundreds of thousands of red flag opioid prescriptions without performing adequate due diligence,” the judge wrote. “Tens of thousands of these prescriptions were written by doctors with suspicious prescribing patterns.”
“The evidence showed that Walgreens did not provide its pharmacists with sufficient time, staff or resources to conduct due diligence on these prescriptions,” Breyer added.
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A Walgreens in San Francisco. (Google Maps) (Google Maps)
The judge noted that the influx of red-flag opioid prescriptions caused San Francisco’s hospitals to be overwhelmed, playgrounds to be filled with drugs and even the city’s libraries to be forced to close at due to toilets clogged by the siren.
Walgreens issued a statement denying the city’s claim.
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“We never manufactured, marketed, or distributed opioids to the ‘pill mills’ and Internet pharmacies that fueled this crisis,” said Walgreens spokesman Fraser Engerman.
Homeless people use illegal drugs at an encampment along Willow St. in the downtown Tenderloin district on Thursday, February 24, 2022 in San Francisco, CA. (Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Engerman also claimed the ruling was an “unprecedented expansion of public nuisance law” and called the attempt “misguided and unsustainable.”
A decision on monetary damages has yet to be determined.
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The Golden Gate City has been particularly hard hit by the opioid crisis. According to the city’s health department, 474 people died in San Francisco last year from fentanyl-related overdoses.
Last week, San Francisco’s new district attorney announced that he would reverse former DA Chesa Boudin’s policy of offering leniency deals for drug offenders.
People sleep near used clothing and used needles on a street in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood on July 25, 2019. (AP)
The new policy prevents serious offenders from being referred to San Francisco’s Community Justice Court (CJC). The CJC is a “progressive reform” program that addresses “the major problems facing the individual and not just their crime,” according to the San Francisco Superior Court.
Under the new policy of prosecutor Brooke Jenkins, dealers arrested with more than five grams of drugs can no longer be referred to the CJC.
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“The previous administration’s policy had no weight threshold, did not adhere to CJC guidelines, and allowed drug dealers, arrested with up to 500 grams of fentanyl, and who had multiple open fentanyl cases, be referred to CJC,” according to Jenkins’ office.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.