Do you even read what you write? In the paragraph just before you said this, you wrote:
but the doctors ... will continue to write refills as long as the patient asks for it.
So in your mind it's the doctors' fault for writing the prescription, NOT the fault of the person who is asking for the medication. How does this make sense to you? How is the doctor to know if the person is in pain or not?
No, in the cases I mentioned, it's very much the fault of the person who is asking for the medication. I'm specifically talking about someone who sustained a minor back injury a year ago but who continues to get monthly prescriptions for vicoden, percosets and xanax.
He had initally been given a prescription for a painkiller. After about a week, the pain was gone to the point where occasional aspirin took care of the pain. But he still had all these pills left over. So he started using them for recreational purposes, to enhance his nightly beer buzz.
Then other people found out about what he was up to and started offering to buy his extra pills. Seeing this as an easy way to enhance his income, he continued to request and receive prescription refills for at least the past year.
I think you can see where this is going. And this is one case, there are many others like it.
Opiates work really well for suppressing pain, but they are quietly and subtly addictive, and the doctor knows this. For this reason, ethical doctors will not let their patient stay on the painkillers chronically; they will seek other solutions to the problem, like trying to wean the patient off the narcotics.
But not all doctors are ethical doctors, some are pill pushers, and people with a fondness for opiates will sometimes go "doctor shopping" to find out who they are.
The doctors themselves have to monitor patient usage when they are writing prescriptions. That's all I was trying to say.