he need to treat chronic pain and the increasing number of patients requiring opioid therapy are among the factors that have led to prescription opioid- related harm. the fre-quency of opioid- related prescriber We analysed Monitoring of of Dependence System (MODDS) for (18 for opioids were 1 Our aim was to determine the most frequently prescribed doses of opioids, and to examine asso-ciations between the mean number of prescribers per patient and the opioid doses dispensed. The database included data for 228 861 opioid prescribers during the study period and 18 798 942 dispensed opioid prescriptions. We undertook multivariate mixed effects Poisson regression, with random intercept by patient identification to account for within-patient correlations and between- patient characteristics. We adjusted for socio- economic status of patient residence (by postcode), 3 as an association between lower socio- economic status and greater opioid prescribing has been reported. 4 We also adjusted our analysis for duration of opioid use, dose in oral morphine milligram equivalents per day (MME/day), and opioid formulation, as in our previous studies. The study and