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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 krishnoid on Tuesday December 31 2019, @05:39AM (3 children)
Maybe not, but it sure as hell isn't a free market. Unless a "free market" includes negotiating with the government to ensure monopoly powers and legal complexity -- which it might, depending on the extent of "free" in that concept.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 31 2019, @06:16AM
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 31 2019, @06:31AM
You ain't wrong. We're way the hell off of anything resembling free market capitalism, or even well managed capitalism, as far as drugs go. Which is exactly why you have to have insurance for routine prescriptions.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday December 31 2019, @06:31PM
Guess where there aren't a whole lot of regulations around this stuff: RWANDA!
And in fact, the place where the FDA DOESN"T exist has the expensive drugs where the place where it DOES exist has the cheap drugs.
Hmmm....