Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman filed a lawsuit Monday against one of the nation’s largest grocery chains, accusing its pharmacies of helping fuel the state’s deadly opioid addiction crisis.
The lawsuit against Kroger claims that the company’s more than 100 pharmacies in Kentucky accounted for more than 11% of all opioid pills dispensed in the state between 2006 and 2019. Without reasonable safeguards, hundreds of millions of opioid pills flooded Kentucky communities, the lawsuit says. Said.
“For more than a decade, Kroger supplied Kentucky with an almost inconceivable number of opioid pills that directly led to addiction, pain, and death,” Coleman said in a statement.
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The lawsuit was filed in Bullitt County Circuit Court in Shepherdsville, 20 miles south of Louisville. The lawsuit seeks, among other things, a $2,000 civil penalty against the grocery chain for each alleged willful violation of the Kentucky Consumer Protection Act.
Kroger officials did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment Monday.
The Bluegrass State has been hit hard by the nation’s overdose crisis and a series of Kentucky attorneys general from both parties, including current Governor John Johnson. Democrat Andy Beshear has aggressively filed lawsuits against companies that manufacture or sell opioid-based drugs. Coleman, a Republican who took office earlier this year, continued that trend with a lawsuit against Kroger, a prominent Kentucky corporate brand.
Pictured June 12, 2012 at a Kroger grocery store in Dearborn, Michigan. (AP Photo/Paul Sancia, File)
In his 2023 announcement, Beshear said Kentucky’s overdose deaths again exceeded 2,000 in 2022, but were down from the previous year. Increased use of fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, has been blamed as a major factor in the state’s chronically high overdose death toll.
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A new lawsuit alleges Kroger did not have an effective monitoring program in place to stop suspicious opioid orders. As a distributor and compounder, Kroger had access to real-time data that revealed unusual prescribing patterns, Coleman’s office said. Despite these “red flags,” Kroger did not report a single suspicious prescription in Kentucky between 2007 and 2014, the AG’s office said.
“Kroger, a company my family has trusted for years, knowingly made these dangerous and highly addictive substances too accessible,” Coleman said. “Worst of all, Kroger never created a formal system, training, or even set of guidelines for reporting suspicious or fraudulent activity.”
The complaint alleges that from 2006 to 2019, Kroger purchased more than 4 billion milligrams of opioids, equivalent to milligrams of morphine, for Kentucky, roughly equivalent to 444 million opioid doses. The company distributed approximately 194 million hydrocodone pills to Kentucky pharmacies from 2006 to 2019, according to the complaint.
