“We allege that Rite Aid filled hundreds of thousands of prescriptions that did not meet legal requirements,” US Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said in a Tuesday statement, adding that “Rite Aid’s pharmacists repeatedly filled prescriptions for controlled substances with obvious red flags, and Rite Aid intentionally deleted internal notes about suspicious prescribers. These practices opened the floodgates for millions of opioid pills and other controlled substances to flow illegally out of Rite Aid’s stores.”
According to US National Institutes for Health (NIH) statistics, the US saw more than 106,000 deaths from drug overdoses in 2021, the most recent year for which there is data. At least 70,000 of those deaths were from synthetic opioids, the most prominent and infamous of which is fentanyl.