Earlier this week, U.S. District Court Judge Jerry Pappert limited the liability of opioid distributor Cencora, formerly known as Amerisourcebergen. The decision came in the case US v. Cencora, an ongoing lawsuit alleging that the company neglected to report numerous suspicious opioid prescriptions, contributing to the opioid crisis.
The judgment restricts the government’s ability to prosecute Cencora for failure to report suspicious prescriptions to incidents occurring after October 2018. This timeframe aligns with when the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) was updated.
In a released memorandum, Judge Pappert outlined his reasons for dismissing the pre-October 2018 charges for failure to report suspicious prescriptions. He highlighted that the CSA as it existed before the amendment didn’t definitively require the company to report, stating, “When a statute ‘has not plainly and unmistakably established’ that the violation of a regulation violates a statute, courts should ‘decline to interpret the penalty provision to embrace such violations.”
This case, filed in December 2022, accused Cencora of amplifying the opioid epidemic by consistently ignoring red flags regarding suspicious prescriptions filled at pharmacies dating back to 2014. The government originally sought $1 billion in damages. Cencora has consistently denied these allegations.
Notably, the US government has previously launched several lawsuits related to pharmaceutical distributors, manufacturers, and pharmacies’ role in the opioid crisis. Cases have been filed nationwide against companies including Purdue, Walgreens, Rite Aid, and Teva Pharmaceuticals among others. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), nearly 280,000 people died due to prescription opioid overdoses from 1999 to 2021.