Too Many Pills, Too Little Oversight

Hollawell soon would learn from medical records that his friend was being prescribed nearly 200 narcotic pain and anxiety pills every week in dosages that easily could be fatal, an expert said. And the doctor who wrote those prescriptions operated on a cash-only basis, which meant no insurance company could flag the extreme pattern.

For Hollawell, now a lawyer in South Jersey, that call - and what he said he discovered about his old buddy's care - triggered what has become an eight-year quest. In seeking justice for three casualties in the national epidemic of painkiller overdoses, he is taking aim at the small number of doctors who play an outsize role in the crisis.