Terrorists, Drug Warriors — What's the Diff?

Unimaginable pain and suffering go untreated throughout much of the world because health authorities believe that strong painkillers, and their potential for addiction, are too great a danger to society. So to prevent abuse, they'd rather let Zainabu Sesay die in agony. Mrs. Sesay is a patient in Sierra Leone, who has breast cancer

...in a form that Western doctors rarely see anymore — the tumor had burst through her skin, looking like a putrid head of cauliflower weeping small amounts of blood at its edges.

Though her pain is as intense as being burned by a flame, she says, no one will give her morphine, a dirt cheap drug that could be in plentiful supply if not for the eradication and prohibition efforts of governments prone to drug wars. So Mrs. Sesay has to make do with Tramadol, a painkiller with one-tenth the potency of morphine.

According to this Times article,

[D]octors from Africa describe patients whose pain is so bad that they have chosen other remedies: hanging themselves or throwing themselves in front of trucks.

That may yet become the only way out for Abdulaziz Sankoh, a seven-year-old with sickle cell disease.

He moans at night when twisted blood cells clump together and jam the arteries in his spindly legs, slowly killing his bone marrow.

Sorry, Abdulaziz: the pharmacist might, just might take opioids recreationally if they were allowed to be imported into Sierra Leone. You never know! You can't be too careful! So to keep him from getting high, Abdulaziz, you're going to have to bite your pillow and let the pain rob you of your last shred of humanity until your body finally gives up and they take your miserable carcass to the morgue. I'm sure you understand. (Of course, there's always the rope, or the truck.)

Musa Shariff could be in for a similar fate. Musa is

...an 8-month-old boy whose scalp is so swollen by meningitis that his eyelids cannot close. Dr. Muctar Jalloh, the hospital director, said he would not prescribe morphine to babies or toddlers if he had it. ... That flies in the face of Western medicine, which allows careful use even in premature infants.

On the 11th of September, today, it's worth contemplating how much pain and grief terrorists have actually managed to inflict on us; and to then contrast that with the much more widespread cruel suffering that highly paid drug warriors and opioid-phobes inflict on frail, pain-wracked patients — babies and young children included — every day.

[hat tip: Nicky Eyle]

Comments

[Martin Owens]

Very dangerous waters you swim in, to be sure, Rogier....

Can you really equate undermedication of individual suffering, due to policies against drug abuse,( an accidental result) to the deliberate mass murder of admittedly innocent people by the thousands (exactly what the perpetrators had in mind)?

[TrappedEastOfTheBigMuddy]

My opinion: Bad pain control policy isn't as bad a terrorism-by-any-reasonable-definition, but the result can _not_ be called 'accidental'.

The policy maker knows or is willfull ignorant of the results and is moraly culpable.

Unecessary pain and suffering because the meds are not in the clinic is a tragady. Setting and enforcing policy that make the meds unobtainable is a _crime_.

There is very little wiggle room in this. If you are standing in the way of a pain patient's relief, you are responsible for their suffering.