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.