SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Rwanda makes its own morphine while U.S. awash with opioids:
It was something, the silence. Nothing but the puff of her breath and the scuff of her slip-on shoes as Madeleine Mukantagara walked through the fields to her first patient of the day. Piercing cries once echoed down the hill to the road below. What she carried in her bag had calmed them.
For 15 years, her patient Vestine Uwizeyimana had been in unrelenting pain as disease wore away at her spine. She could no longer walk and could barely turn over in bed. Her life narrowed to a small, dark room with a dirt-floor in rural Rwanda, prayer beads hanging on the wall by her side.
A year ago, relief came in the form of liquid morphine, locally produced as part of Rwanda's groundbreaking effort to address one of the world's great inequities: As thousands die from addiction in rich countries awash with prescription painkillers, millions of people writhe in agony in the poorest nations with no access to opioids at all.
Companies don't make money selling cheap, generic morphine to the poor and dying, and most people in sub-Saharan Africa cannot afford the expensive formulations like oxycodone and fentanyl, prescribed so abundantly in richer nations that thousands became addicted to them.
Rwanda's answer: plastic bottles of morphine, produced for pennies and delivered to homes across the country by community health workers like Mukantagara. It is proof, advocates say, that the opioid trade doesn't have to be guided by how much money can be made.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday December 31 2019, @03:17AM (6 children)
What are you talking about? Cigarettes are fully legal (as long as you're at least 21, thanks to new legislation that Trump just signed) in all 50 states. No one is stopping you from going outside and smoking all you want. You just can't smoke in restaurants and other places where it's going to bother people. But boo hoo, you might have to stand outside in the rain to do it. I fail to see how this is a problem.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday December 31 2019, @03:27AM
No one is stopping you from going outside and smoking all you want.
*cough* [publichealthlawcenter.org]
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 31 2019, @04:33AM
Not a smoker, I see.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday December 31 2019, @07:20PM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 31 2019, @10:32PM (2 children)
And choosing to expose yourself to second hand smoke ethically differs from choosing the more direct route enough to warrant government prohibition, how? That's not a smoker beef by the way, that's a libertarian, WTF business is it of the government's beef.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 01 2020, @07:53PM (1 child)
God DAMN you take libtard to a new level.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 02 2020, @12:36PM
Eat a dick, lung-nazi.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.