Walmart is Rejecting Prescriptions and Screwing Over Patients With Addiction

Walmart pharmacies will not fill a controlled substance prescription via telehealth unless that patient has had an in-person visit with their doctor.

Patients with opioid addiction who receive medication treatment through telehealth are increasingly struggling to get pharmacies like Walmart to fill their prescriptions.

“I stopped sending scripts there a while ago because patients kept having such bad experiences,” one telehealth provider, who requested anonmity so they could speak their mind, told me. “Walmart has been horrible to patients— so much stigma, so many hoops to jump through, so many [prescription] denials.”

One pharmacist told me these new policies restricting access to drugs like buprenorphine could result in even more overdose deaths.

To understand what’s going on here, we have to go back to the earliest days of the pandemic in March and April of 2020. Covid-19 was on a collision course with soaring overdose deaths, so the federal government implemented some fairly useful policy changes that made accessing lifesaving medications much easier for everyday people with addiction. Drugs like methadone and buprenorphine (Suboxone) are some of the most heavily regulated and restricted drugs on the market. To be sure, methadone much more than buprenorphine.

Under the new rules, many more patients could now receive take-home doses than they were previously allowed. Take-home doses increased by 200 percent during the pandemic, and research found this change “was not associated with negative treatment outcomes,” a finding that really throws a wrench into the whole rationale undergirding America’s restrictive (and often punitive) methadone clinic system.

Another big pandemic change allowed licensed providers to prescribe buprenorphine virtually or over the phone—aka telehealth/telemedicine—without ever seeing the patient for an in-person visit. This drastically expanded people’s ability to access the drug. But now that access is being threatened by chain pharmacies like Walmart that fear they’ll be sued again over lacksadasical dispensation of controlled substances.