The article makes the assumption that the likes of Walmart, Walgreens and CVS should be responsible for "monitoring" what doctors legitimate prescriptions are being asked to fill, as if they were doing anything illegal by doing this. If a licensed MD writes a prescription for a medication, their responsibility begins and ends with fulfilling that legally authorized prescription. It is bizarre to think that these companies should have some system in place to refuse to fill these legally authorized prescriptions. If the DEA wants these drugs off the street, they should work with congress to have these drugs added to the Schedule I list. Speaking of the Schedule I list, which includes Heroin (an opiod), I've never understood the rationale that could conclude that Heroin (an opiod) would be listed as a Schedule I (no medical benefit), yet all the other opiod analogs are not listed there as well. As a matter of fact, there is an Analogs Act [0] that has been in place to specifically deal with analogs of Schedule I substances. These drugs, like Oxycontin, Oxycodone, Hydrocodone, other opiod analogs, you would think would fall under the Analogs Act, but for some reason they were lobbied to not be part of that -- therefore allowing a few large players to make billions of dollars a year because of it and allow millions of people to overdose.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analogue_Act