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: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 31 2019, @04:53PM (2 children)
Based on what evidence? And what game theory? Here's my problems with the alleged central nature of trade with India and China. First, the two regions were peripheral to global trade by the 1930s. North American-European trade would dwarf that.
Second, the greatest impact was to the (what is present day) developed world. For example, Roosevelt's seizure of gold didn't directly affect people in India and China. Instead it affected people living in the US. Note the timing. Roosevelt forbid [wikipedia.org] the "hoarding" of gold in April 5, 1933 via executive order - that only affects people in the US. And then took [history.com] the US off the gold standard in June 5, 1933. Compare the relative blights of gold hoarders in the US versus China as of that latter moment.
In the US, one would have gold that is illegal to own or sell, except at reduced price to the US government. You'd have to sell it surreptitiously at significant cost or hide it somewhere and hope the regulations change (which they did in 1974!). Meanwhile what happens to the hoarder in China? The value of their gold goes up. The devaluation doesn't work at all since they didn't own what actually got devalued - the US dollar! And that's the third point, sure, gold was devalued in the US and elsewhere where gold was now illegal to hold as investment. But it increased in value in areas where that ban no longer applied. And the real consequence of taking currencies off of the gold (and later silver) standard was to devalue those currencies not the precious metals.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday December 31 2019, @08:55PM (1 child)
I've linked a random paper in the other thread ( https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1113&context=ulra [lmu.edu] ) touching on this but not the one I had in mind since I can't find it. Regardless, the modern research is far more data driven and unbiased than what Wikipedia uses and there's a lot of econ-math-history types asking these questions so you don't have to look too far if you google for scholarly works on the subject. I mean, most serious historians refuse to work on anything under 100years old since it's too politically risky. So whatever we were taught during high school is guaranteed be one form or the next of propaganda.
In currency but not in raws. Don't forget it wasn't supply and demand determining the prices of products in those regions. It was trade monopolies backed by military strength. The contemporary equivalence is oil: Barrels should easily cost 5-10 times what they currently cost but the US and Russia keep the prices down through force of arms.
And it's also where the game theory kicks in: While the whole nation doesn't necessarily benefit from these resource wars, it doesn't mean military contractors and energy multinational aren't. That's where the trading companies enter and the papers usually focus on.
Measuring everything in dollar signs doesn't work. While India was basically unaffected, the Republic Of China was taken over by the PRC during those years due to how the great depression affected the city people. Sure, things were already quite shaky... But this is all Opium Wars, late Qing era events and processes we're talking about here.
Again, bad economics and all that... And don't forget the people working at the federal didn't necessarily represent the nations' interests much like how regulatory capture currently damages national interests. There was noble prize awarded to an history-econ type a few years ago that looked at the actual people who supported WW2 and noted they and their business profited from the war despite their people's suffering. Don't assume the people sitting in congress that voted to do nothing about the great depression weren't profiting much like how the FCC and EPA operate under Trump.
Personally I feel it will take another 100 years before something worth while could be said about the events simply because half the senators in office had fathers and grand fathers involved in the (bad) decisions in question. And even then, it will be published in French, German, Spanish or even Chinese... But not in English. Maybe it will get translated. Referenced even... But to actually make it to the history books? I mean, wasn't it just a few years when they finally fixed the history books related to the storming on the Bastille? And that was a localized event... 200 years might not even be enough.
compiling...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 01 2020, @07:09AM