Chip Wood’s Response To Lawsuit

The story posted by WTOC on Facebook regarding the lawsuit filed against Chip’s Discount Drugs does not tell the whole story. We were never contacted by WTOC for our side, in fact the story was posted on Facebook before we even received a copy of the lawsuit! There have been a lot of comments about the matter on Facebook that are simply not true and made out of ignorance of the facts.
In order to address the one-sided article and the comments thereon by people who choose to believe the worst, or are prone to make uninformed statements or opinions, we would like our friends and customers, as well as the general public to know what is really going on.
FIRST and foremost, this is not a criminal case! It is a civil lawsuit the Government has filed over disputes regarding facts surrounding the filling of a very small percentage of our store’s total prescriptions.
There is no allegation that our store filled fake prescriptions or dispensed any medicines without a legitimate prescription from a doctor whose license was valid and not flagged by the DEA or any other government agency as being under investigation for any reason. Every prescription we filled that the government is now suing us about, we checked to determine if the physician was in good standing with the DEA and saw that he was. We now learn that the doctor was under investigation for over a year! But the DEA did not either notify the pharmacies or show a notation on their registry that we checked that the doctor was under investigation.
SECOND, the Government has taken issue with our store filling prescriptions for customers who see doctors other than those within the immediate vicinity, notwithstanding the fact that Hazlehurst is 100 miles away from any major medical community with specialized practices.
THIRD, there is a major dispute between us and the government as to whether we should have questioned the “need” of the patient for a certain prescription even though we don’t have access to the patient’s medical files and condition and even though that is not our job to second guess a doctor’s diagnosis and treatment.
FOURTH, the actual number of prescriptions filled is in dispute. In negotiations prior to the suit being filed, we have shown the government this information but it has been ignored. It has further ignored that the number of prescriptions filled for the drugs targeted in the lawsuit is an insignificant percentage of the actual number and sales with our total prescription base. In other words, we had no incentive in filling any these now disputed prescriptions.
Finally, our customers know our business as a local hometown pharmacy that has brought lower prices and better service to our community. Because of you, our business has grown far beyond what we ever expected. We have never had a need to, nor will we ever, knowingly violate the law or abuse our goodwill in the community.
We will aggressively defend the lawsuit because we have done nothing wrong!