US District Court Judge Jerry Pappert limited the liability of opioid distributor Cencora (previously known as Amerisourcebergen) on Monday in the case US v. Cencora, which is a case alleging the company failed to report thousands of suspicious opioid prescriptions, fueling the opioid epidemic. The government will now only be able to prosecute the company for failure to report suspicious prescriptions after October 2018, when the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) was amended.

Along with his order, Pappert released a memorandum explaining his reasoning for dismissing the suspicious prescription charges before October 2018. Pappert ruled that the version of the CSA in force prior to October 2018 did not clearly require the company to report suspicious prescriptions despite some regulations potentially requiring it, stating, “When a statute ‘has not plainly and unmistakably established’ that the violation of a regulation violates a statute, courts should ‘decline to interpret the penalty provision to embrace such violations.'”

The case, originally filed in December 2022, alleged that Cencora “fueled” the opioid crisis by repeatedly ignoring reports of suspicious prescriptions for medications they distributed being filled at pharmacies as early as 2014, with the government seeking $1 billion in damages. Cencora has denied the allegations.

This is not the first suit the government has filed related to pharmaceutical distributors’, manufacturers’ and pharmacies’ role in the opioid epidemic. Suits have been filed across the US against companies such as Purdue, Walgreens, Rite Aid, Teva Pharmaceuticals, CVS, McKesson Corporation, Cardinal Health Inc., Johnson & Johnson and Mallinckrodt. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), from 1999 to 2021 nearly 280,000 people have died due to overdosing on prescription opioids.