Helena Foulkes, the corporate CEO who announced last month she is running as a Democrat for Rhode Island Governor, loves to tout her 25-year record at CVS. She says among her many accomplishments, she is responsible for creating the ExtraCare card for the retailer.
But she won’t answer questions about the charges made by Attorney Generals around the country, who claim that under Foulkes' leadership as President of CVS, the company profited off the opioid epidemic.
According to the CDC, the U.S. economic cost of opioid use disorder ($471 billion) and fatal opioid overdose ($550 billion) during 2017 totaled over one trillion dollars.
Attorney General Daniel Cameron filed a lawsuit in June against CVS Health for the company’s role in Kentucky’s opioid epidemic. The lawsuit, filed in Franklin Circuit Court, alleges the company engaged in unlawful business practices and failed to guard against the diversion of opioids. CVS is not alone. The suit against CVS is the latest action to hold companies accountable for their role in the Commonwealth’s opioid crisis, said Cameron.
“During the height of the opioid epidemic, CVS allowed millions of dosage units of opioids to flood Kentucky’s borders, fueling the crisis and devastating thousands of families and communities across the Commonwealth,” said Cameron. “As both distributor and pharmacy, CVS was in a unique position to monitor and stop the peddling of these highly-addictive drugs from their stores, yet they ignored their own safeguard systems. By bringing this lawsuit on behalf of the people of Kentucky, we are holding CVS accountable for these decisions and for contributing to a man-made crisis that tragically led to the loss of life of thousands of Kentuckians.”
"CVS maintained over 100 separate license numbers in the Commonwealth as a 'wholesaler,' 'out-of-state pharmacy,' and 'retail pharmacy.' Between 2006 and 2014, CVS pharmacies in Kentucky purchased more than 151 million dosage units of oxycodone and hydrocodone from its own distribution centers and third-party distributors, accounting for nearly 6.1 percent of the total dosage units in the Commonwealth during this time," according to Cameron.
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