https://www.wrshlaw.com/blog/medical-malpractice/medical-mal...
The heart of the issue is that it's a legally approved drug. That's where the debate moves into questions like: To what extent can a doctor prescribe a drug before it can be perceived as medical malpractice?
Since the 2010s, states and federal government in the U.S. have started to enact countermeasures against the Opioid Crisis. This includes cracking down on pharmacists and doctors who over-prescribe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic_in_the_United_...
Reading into the above, you'll notice that the story is far more complex. It's a "wicked" problem with many in's and out's. On the surface level, fixing this seems easy, until you start digging into this and you see complex interests, countless stakeholders, political tensions, power structures, dependencies on other policy issues, etc. add to the complexity.
Greedy doctors killed my aunt by selling her all the drugs she asked for. This is commonplace in the US.
Doctors should be held accountable - every script they write, is tracked - it would not be hard to find the doctors that are outside the range of normal.
Insurance companies should also be held accountable - they pay for a big portion of these oversubscribed opioids, they know who is writing those scripts, they know when a duration or quantity is out of the normal bounds, and yet they still keep enabling it.
But doctors do not get a cut of the prescriptions they write, not legally anyway, so don't think its greedy doctors - more like doctors who have to see upto 32 patients a day, in 15 min increments, and don't have time to argue with persistent drug seekers, so the close their eyes and pretend they don't know what is going on - and move on to the next 15 min appointment.
Doctors aren’t reimbursed for prescribing medications directly (except chemotherapy infusions). Was the physician selling the medication directly? That’s not commonplace.
Clinicians may financially benefit from not refusing their patients requests and thus losing the patient to another doctor that will acquiesce. But that’s a tricky topic to untangle.