Before you decide that the government is doing a good thing, go to your local cancer center and sit in the treatment waiting room and listen to every person in the place complain about how much of a pain in the ass getting pain meds are.

Fuck the .gov for making this so hard on people. Who cares if a few are getting high? Really! Who gives a fuck compared to all the suffering people with legitimate needs have over this issue. It is STUPID!

If I were King, I would have a big ass bowl right by the door, next to the candy jar and let people grab all the pain meds they wanted as they walked by every day.

The Govt, and credentialing/regulatory agencies created this.  About 20 years ago it started... I watched it happen.  When the "culture of pain" became a thing, and the aggressive treatment of pain became part of medicine's official canon (despite the reservations expressed by physicians about abuse and addiction), this was inevitable.

"Pain is the fifth vital sign."
"Make sure you document those pain scores"
"Pain is subjective, so medicate it."
"You can't judge another person's pain."
"You have to take the patient's word for it"
"treating pain is a JCAHO requirement"
"not treating pain is racist"
"It's unethical to not treat pain"
"you're cruel if you don't treat pain aggressively"
"pain relief is one of your highest duties as a physician"
"This affects patient satisfaction scores"

etc, etc, etc

They've been coming at physicians about this issue from all sides, for >20 years... and now they're surprised that there's a problem?  Only NOW?

This.

I have several degenerated discs.  I had surgery in July and am pain free for the time being, but the surgeon told me to expect to need more surgeries in the future.

Valium still has significant addiction potential (not as bad as the short-acting benzos, but it's still there).

And benzo withdrawal is no joke.

ETA:  all of which you know... I'm just putting it out there for the non-clinicians.

There is no good answer currently, there really isn't.
I've seen all sides of the arguments countless times, and the only solution is to actually find a medication that works as well as narcotics for acute and chronic pain, but has no addiction potential. It's the holy grail of pain management.

Once upon a time in NY, hydrocodone/apap (Vicodin, Norco) was schedule III, standard paper script, and oxycodone/apap (Percocet) was schedule II, required a "triplicate" prescription. No limits on quantities per script, but no refills on the "triplicates".
The result of this was drug seeking patients changing the refills on the schedule III's to 4, or 5. Also, since there was no tracking at the pharmacy level, they could do the same thing from more than one provider, and use multiple pharmacies, keep a steady supply.

Then NY decided to stop allowing any refills on any schedule narcotic. Otherwise the system stayed the same.  So patients started stealing prescription pads and forging their own. That happened to me once, an interesting story in it's own right, but I digress....

So NY, in its wisdom, decided to make hydrocodone meds schedule II, put it onto "triplicates", except providers got really upset, because NY charged us to purchase "triplicates". The answer to this was to provide us new prescription pads, supplied by the state, "free" of charge. Not sure which pocket they appropriated the massive funding for this from, but to provide prescription pads to every provider, registered, serialized and on tamper proof security feature paper was ridiculously expensive. And hey, while we're at it, lets just make every prescription, regardless of medication or schedule, go onto the new pads. That will certainly save some money.

The net result of this was to see a dramatic sudden increase in street drug use. We also started to see an uptick in armed robbery for meds at the pharmacy and provider office level, and the new pads were being stolen too.  Plus costs for pads were spiraling out of control, it was incredibly time consuming at the pharmacy to enter all the info for tracking purposes, and we also had the (always a problem) handwriting and medication error issues to deal with.

The answer to this was to mandate full electronic prescribing for every provider, for every prescription. They put a deadline on it, and as it approached not only wasn't the state ready, but a huge amount of providers weren't set up either. The backlog was months long. So they put it off a year, and in March 2016, it became the law across the state.  I have no idea of the total costs to implement this across the board, but the number must be staggering. It cost me alone almost 60K, because I needed to use practice management software that was compatible with the state level software, so I had to get that, and of course, the new software didn't want to play nicely with my existing hardware, so 10 workstations needed to be replaced, and the training for all the components took two full days, etc, etc, etc. But, to it's credit, the pharmacies don't have to decipher poor penmanship anymore, and it is much harder to game the system. On the downside, is that it takes me a few minutes, per patient, to click and type my way through, and since I write anywhere from 50-60 scripts per day, it adds a not insignificant burden to my day.

So the system has been in place for a year and a half, the street drug issues are still rising, oversight is ridiculous and time consuming, more and more providers are backing away from narcotics partially or entirely, real patients are suffering, and there is still no good solution.

<<side anecdote>>  Maybe 15 years ago an NSAID called Duract hit the marketplace. It was the most potent and effective NSAID that had ever been available, and in every single clinical study it was conclusively demonstrated to be more effective at managing acute pain than 20mg of oxycodone per dose.  It was awesome. I took such pleasure in giving it to all the drug seekers. They sent providers these beautiful full color posters, "One Duract more potent than Two Percocet". They left happy, until of course, they didn't get high.  Sorry Charlie, you're S.O.L.  Unfortunately, it was such a good acute pain reliever that it started to get used a lot, and then it started to get used for chronic pain, even though there was a black box warning for maximum 5 days use. Patients started to have serious issues, and it was pulled from the market.

Narcotic use, and abuse, is, always was, and always will be a difficult problem to manage. My apologies to all the good people suffering because my colleagues have gotten gun shy. And my apologies to all the families of the addicts that got hooked by overprescribing and inappropriate prescribing. Until we find the magic elixir, or legalize everything and let the chips fall where they may, we're stuck.

There's nothing subtle about it.

Nothing.

Non-providers have no idea how pervasive it is... I'm not exaggerating when I say this has been a long-term and growing pressure on physicians.

Particularly when your government agencies are literally tracking "door-to-pain-medication times" (yes, that's actually a thing) as one of the "Core Measures" of quality care...
and JCAHO has been using "assessment and management of pain" as a quality standard since 2001...  
And JCAHO has been using pain management to satisfy ORYX performance measurement requirements for Quality Care...
And the Institute for Healthcare Improvement includes pain management as part of their "Triple Aim" to reduce costs and improve care...
and these "quality measures" are publicly reported by CMS/Medicare and used to grade hospitals on Quality...
And the FedGov financially penalizes hospitals that don't treat pain "adequately"

Gosh... I wonder why overprescribing has become a problem.

I repeat... the FedGov and accreditation/certification agencies have been driving this train for a LONG time.