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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: 5, Interesting) by Rich on Monday December 30 2019, @11:31PM (12 children)
This reeks of a PR agency stuff modeled after a certain pattern.
Not too long ago I heard (or read?! I think it was on news radio) a little news report, one of those which can't be longer than 90 seconds, or people would switch channels on format radio. Same pattern, entirely different topic, allegedly about CO2 reduction through renewables in Sweden:
It started out with creating the imagination of a fuzzy relation to people we'd like to like. In this case a Swedish family. As they started with describing how the happy Swedish family sat in their happy warm Swedish home, and the little meatballs the Swedes love fizzled in the pan, it was already friggin' obvious I was with near certainty listening to a PR piece. I got curious who paid for it. So they went on how the Swedes were trying really hard to heal the planet with all their renewables. Yaddayadda. My curiosity grew. And then: "But Sweden still gets 40% of their energy from their nuclear power plants.". Aaaaah!
I thought "that's champagne and blow from the agency for the responsible media manager tomorrow". My first guess on who footed the bill was on EDF (the French state 'leccy corp.), because they really couldn't afford an exit. But then they even gave away the name in a half-sentence: "Vattenfall". And I thought, "well, hookers, too, for even getting the client's name in; but it's bloody amazing they get away with that obvious shit". And Vattenfall really hasn't much to lose here in Germany.
In that case the true message to be communicated was: "ATOMIC POWER FROM VATTENFALL MAKES YOU HAPPY!"
The report about the poor woman in Rwanda follows exactly the same pattern. At equal odds I would bet that someone got paid to get the message across: "OPIATES ARE THE ONLY HOPE FOR THE SUFFERING". (Forget Rwanda and the lady, the're only there for the recipients emotional setting.) Because no one would dare to stop those benevolent corporations who provide the only hope for the suffering.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 31 2019, @12:04AM (1 child)
Your take is super interesting.
When my son was young, I used to ask him to tell me why he thought things were as they were. We would go to a grocery store, and I'd ask about the layout of the isles from the entrance, "Do you think this layout is to try to get us to perform some action? What action?" He would think about a moment, and say, "They are trying to get us to go down this isle (points ahead)." We played this game a lot, especially when we were interacting with commercial environments, advertisement, etc., but also when interacting with particularly manipulative individuals. He asked me about it when he was older. I told him it is important to know when people are trying to manipulate you. It is up to you and the situation how you respond to that manipulation, but, by being aware, even when you decide to go along with it, you are in control.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 31 2019, @12:35AM
You can take this one step further and question what is ingrained by culture. Cultural conditioning is invisible to most people until they live in another culture.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday December 31 2019, @12:17AM (7 children)
Did...did you even read where the morphine was coming from in Rwanda?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 31 2019, @12:48AM
The CIA, deep state operatives and elitists.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Tuesday December 31 2019, @02:18AM (5 children)
No. It's neither in the SN sum-up nor in the CBS article. There is mention of "small amounts of liquid morphine", which is entirely unscientific, because morphine is a solid substance that's mostly insoluble in water. So questions would be which soluble derivative of morphine they use, whether it is made synthetically, or extracted from poppy, or imported from China. Who does what processing and packaging with whose permissions? What safeguards are in place to make sure the stuff doesn't end up in the downtown ghettos? What would they do if the traveling nurse is held up and the poor rural lady awaiting her dose does the turkey?
So the article was written by someone who has no clue of the subject, but decides to write an article anyway and by what must be magic ends up in rural Ruanda just at the right moment to witness the delivery of a dose of morphine between two people known by name? No western person goes there without a very, very good cause. This article has no named author: It's "AP with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting". Which is not affiliated with the Pulitzer Prizes. Go figure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 31 2019, @04:00AM
It's "AP with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting"
I have been watching those 'slashvertisiment' style AP/Reuters style reporting for a few decades now. Many of them are as you say. Some sort of manufactured manipulative thing.
I had to drive across the country once. I decided on NPR the whole way. *THAT* was an interesting trip. I learned every NPR station from here to my destination 1500 miles away had investigative journalists! All of them reading the exact same news piece which came from Reuters after a modicum of personal investigation. People would be shocked how easy it is to manufacture news. The company I work for right now does it all the time. People eat it up. They think there is a legion of journalists which are vetting the news and fact checking everything. Sadly that is not even remotely true. Most of them are shockingly underpaid and overworked. They do the bare minimum and think they are going to be the next woodward and bernstien.
My personal favorite is the half story. Where you pick something out of context. Straw-man the hell out of it then tell people what they should think about it. If you want to see a master at work of this form watch John Oliver on HBO. A true master manipulator. He uses a particular formula for almost all of his stories. It is a mix of humor and telling you what to think (because you are smart) story telling. He and his writing time are master of their craft. It is entertaining. But once you 'see' the formula you can not unsee it.
You are right that does strike me as a side bit of manipulation someone is winding up for. If I were to put money on it I would say the company that owns Oxycontin. But that is rank speculation there...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 31 2019, @04:20AM
Tons of westerners go to Rwanda. The number one draw is the mountain gorillas, and even if you are trying to view them at lower cost (Rwanda has very high permit costs to try to reduce the number of tourists and their impact on the gorillas), the easiest way to enter the area of Uganda with mountain gorillas, is to go via Rwanda.
Rwanda has come *a long way* since the Hutu Tutsi horor that was instigated by the Dutch imperialists (the Dutch invented the categories, and classified people into these categories by how dark their skin tone was, and other physical features-- gave preferential treatment / jobs to the minority group, and fomented the resentment by the majority).
(Score: 2) by Codesmith on Tuesday December 31 2019, @01:14PM (2 children)
You need to brush up on your reading skill, or perhaps new glasses.
Right in the middle of the SN sum-up.
Pro utilitate hominum.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Tuesday December 31 2019, @02:52PM (1 child)
We read about the wall decorations of the poor lady, yet we don't read who is beyond this "groundbreaking effort" and how the "local production" works. You should have been able to imply from my questions that I wondered just what precise kind of local production happens there. There must be some sort of organization and supply chain. Given the larger environment, it might even be a cover up for something else. Assuming they have some poppy fields, go to a nearby shady supply store and ask for anhydrous acetic acid. If they stock it, you know it is... but they also might kill you right away.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday December 31 2019, @03:52PM
yet we don't read who is beyond this "groundbreaking effort" and how the "local production" works.
The same way they supply Emerald City...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 31 2019, @04:52AM (1 child)
AFAIK, they are the base provider from Hamburg to Berlin, and I believe much of East Germany.
Must have been a while ago, because Mommy Merkel reinstated the "nukexit" after the Fukushima accident, a few years after she abandoned it which the previous government had begun when she took power. I don't think nuclear has a political future in Germany, regardless of PR.
Vattenfall is currently suing Germany at the World Bank in Washington about having to shut down their reactors in Germany: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vattenfall_gegen_Bundesrepublik_Deutschland [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Rich on Tuesday December 31 2019, @12:14PM
It was recent. Couple of weeks, at most half a year. Definitely after Krümmel and Brunsbüttel had been shut down, only a minority stake in Brokdorf seems to be left. Might have been either be related to the lawsuit, or to shape a European climate in which they can continue to run Forsmark and others until 2040 or later. Or it was just a very old report and they pulled it out once more.