A King County Superior Court judge ordered Albertsons to pay $900 million on Nov. 5 in Washington’s opioid case, plus fees and costs, after finding its pharmacies filled red-flagged opioid prescriptions more than 6.5 million times without documenting efforts to confirm they were legitimate. Washington Attorney General Nick Brown’s office announced the $900 million judgment, which covers Albertsons, Safeway and Haggen pharmacies in the state. The release does not say whether the company will appeal.
The case turned on a plain question: what a pharmacy must do when a prescription looks wrong. Albertsons owns more than 200 pharmacies in Washington under those three banners, and the state argued that too many of those prescriptions were filled anyway…