By: Lara Sewers
Even in Japan,
a heavily medicated society, many still die in pain. While doctors are becoming
more willing to prescribe drugs like morphine, many patients still fear
addiction, and refuse to consume the drug. However, the government is actively
campaigning for more pain killers to be prescribed and to re-educate the
population about the benefits of its medicinal use.[1]
The World Health Organization estimates that 4.8 million
people a year, who suffer from cancer, go untreated and die severely painful
deaths.
While six countries – United
States, Canada,
France, Germany, Britain and Australia
– consume 79% of the world’s morphine, the poor and middle income countries,
consume only about 6%. Ironically, last year, half of the six million people
that died of cancer were from poor countries. About 80% of these cancer
patients experience severe pain. In some
of these developing countries, many patients have chosen to end their suffering
by taking their lives.[3]
In many countries, governments are hesitant to allow use of
these drugs for fear of drug abuse and drug-related crime. But since the elites
in these countries have access to them, they care little about the rest of the
population left to die in pain.
Even if governments would allow for the prescription and
distribution of morphine, in many poor countries, governments are more
concerned with treatment of the top five causes of death in these parts of the
world – diarrhea, pneumonia, tuberculosis, malaria, and STDs. Palliative care
is just not a percentage large enough to become a priority.
Opium is not in short supply, and morphine, its derivative,
is not as expensive either. Hospitals in Africa have found ways to mix their own liquid morphine cheaply, costing less than a
loaf of bread would.[6] Notwithstanding this, doctors in developing countries still adhere to beliefs
held many decades ago about the risks of addiction and to the health of the
patient. Thus, some refuse to prescribe it even while the patients suffer.
Disparities in the availability of morphine and related
drugs are noticeable between developed and developing countries, but even
within developed countries, some still have more access than others. Even
though morphine consumption in the U.S.is about 17,000 times that of places like Sierra Leone, disparities of access
to these narcotics exist even among our population. Cancer patients who live in
Asian or Hispanic neighborhoods lack ready access to pain medications like
morphine because often, local pharmacies do not stock them. In white
neighborhoods around 72% of pharmacies had adequate supplies compared to 25% of
nonwhite neighborhoods.[7]
Whereas in the U.S.the disparity in access to
morphine and related drugs in minority neighborhoods is tied to racial and
ethnic factors, doctors do not refuse to prescribe medications to ease their
patients’ pain. In developing countries,
refusal to prescribe morphine is tied to myths about side-effects that have
long proved wrong.
It is shocking that while pain relief is often the only
thing that doctors can offer patients who are in advance stages of a disease,
it is the one thing they withhold. Furthermore, while countries like Afghanistan attempt to get rid of their poppies plantation in order to curb heroin production,
millions could use the product to die less painfully. Programs proposed by
researchers in London
such as “Poppy for Medicine” would allow Afghan farmers to move their current
poppy crop away from the production of illegal narcotics and devote the crop to
the production of legal morphine medicines. Allowing these farmers to
participate in a legal marketplace for pain relief medicines that meet the
WHO’s standards and making the products more available to those dying in pain,
is a no-brainer. We just
need those in the position to make these decisions in developing countries, to
move away from archaic beliefs and do the right thing to ease their
population’s pain.
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