Investigators said the pharmaceutical manufacturer, one of the nation’s largest, had knowingly distributed opioids that were later resold illegally.The Justice Department filed a lawsuit on Thursday against AmerisourceBergen, one of the country’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturers, accusing the company of knowingly distributing opioids that were later resold illegally.The suit, filed by the department’s civil division in conjunction with federal prosecutors in New Jersey, Florida, Colorado, Pennsylvania and New York, is part of a growing effort by federal agencies to hold drug companies accountable for their role in the nation’s opioid crisis. It accuses AmerisourceBergen and two of its subsidiaries of “at least hundreds of thousands” of violations of the Controlled Substances Act. If the company is found liable, it could face billions of dollars in fines, according to Vanita Gupta, the associate attorney general overseeing the civil division.Under federal law, wholesale drug distributors like AmerisourceBergen are obligated to report “suspicious” orders of controlled substances to the Drug Enforcement Administration. An order is considered suspicious if it is an unusual size or does not follow the normal pattern or frequency, or if it raises other concerns, such as the legitimacy of a customer’s business.In an 80-page complaint, filed in Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the Justice Department accused AmerisourceBergen of failing to report many of these suspicious orders for nearly a decade, in what it described as an “egregious failure” that had contributed to the opioid epidemic.More than 90,000 people died in the United States from drug overdoses in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Opioids were involved in close to 75 percent of those deaths.Fentanyl Overdoses: What to KnowCard 1 of 5Devastating losses.