Drug War makes world's poorest live in pain

How positively moronic is the right-wing War on Drugs? It's so bad that it forces many to live and die in pain that even thousands of years ago they never would have had to suffer.

Humans have a natural tendency to seek substances that alleviate conditions that ail them. This practice has been seen from the earliest human settlement through today. But for this human function, people never would have even discovered basic medicine.

But the drug warriors have huffed out a big Allowed Cloud that tries to deny what nature gives us. While big drug companies manufacture crap that doesn't even work, the DEA raids users of medical marijuana (even in states where medical marijuana is legal) despite the fact that this substance actually works. Actually it's more like because, not despite. Big Medicine can't compete with medical marijuana without a lot of government help.

But now it's not just medical marijuana that's under attack. Now morphine is too.

Morphine has been used for at least 6,000 years and comes straight from the opium poppy. Morphine is addictive, but when used properly, it eases pain caused by cancer and other illnesses and injuries. The effectiveness of morphine and the abundance of the opium poppy in some regions make morphine a very practical medicine. Scientists now know that the bodies of humans and other animals actually make some of their own morphine.

Almost everywhere in the world, morphine is perfectly legal when prescribed by a doctor. And it's cheap. But - especially in the world's poorest countries - some doctors and pharmacists won't have anything to do with it, because the Drug War has created such fear surrounding the drug. David Joranson of the Pain Policy Study Group at the University of Wisconsin says medical concerns like pain relief just haven't received as much as attention as fighting the failed Drug War has. The Drug War affects doctors' beliefs about the types of medicines they have at their disposal. And - because of the Drug War - governments around the world are fearful of changing the laws to make the opioid more readily available for its proper use. (Very few countries allow trained nurses to prescribe it.)

Anyone who isn't desperately poor and suffers severe cancer pain would find this situation unacceptable. But anyone who isn't very poor can likely find a doctor who will prescribe morphine. In the poorest, most isolated regions, however, that's hard to do.

Are the drug warriors proud of themselves for denying millions of people access to several medically effective substances that occur in nature and have been used for thousands of years?

(Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/health/10pain.html)