> There's no way we have enough doctors to get all the long-term prescriptions correctly and quickly re-issued on paper when the need arises.

In the US, prescriptions with refills have a label on the bottle indicating how many refills left. I imagine in a recognized crisis, you would be able to get those refilled with little trouble, maybe even if it said zero refills as long as it was a drug typically used long term and not a drug commonly abused.