Maybe it's because Americans just have this cognitive dissonance that their trusted doctor could be any less than 100% conscientious about their health, but we need to plainly face the fact that if members of the press were able to write exposés about drug makers' fudging the data about the addictiveness and effectiveness of their products, that doctors with their medical training and responsibility over actual people's lives should have proceeded with more caution and not written scripts mindlessly to get rid of every tiny pain patients had just because they kept asking for something. It's just unconscionable.
EDIT: this survey was also very damning: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-prescri...