The demonization of opiates is hurting people.

[Comrade Grumpy]

68. There's another way of looking at that stat about 5% of the population and 80% of the opioids.

And that's that people in large parts of the world are suffering needlessly from untreated pain.

Here's what the World Health Organization has to say:

http://www.who.int/medicines/areas/quality_safety/Impaired_Access/en/

Severe undertreatment is reported in more than 150 countries, both developing and industrialized. They count for about 80% of the world's population. Annually, at least 6 million people suffer from lack of access to controlled medications. Most of them are pain patients, but also other conditions are involved. The impact of impaired access to these medications is huge.

And here's what Human Rights Watch has to say:

http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/hhr0511W.pdf

<snip>

In 2009 and 2010 Human Rights Watch surveyed palliative care experts in 40 countries to map
the barriers that impede the availability of palliative care and pain treatment worldwide. We
asked them about the situation in their country in three areas that WHO has said are critical to
the development of palliative care: health policy, education of healthcare workers, and drug
availability. We also analyzed publicly available data from all countries on consumption of
opioid medications that can be used to treat chronic pain and compared them to cancer and
AIDS mortality data to assess how well the need for pain treatment is met.

We found enormous unmet need for pain treatment. Fourteen countries reported no
consumption of opioid pain medicines between 2006 and 2008, meaning that there are no
medicines to treat moderate to severe pain available through legitimate medical channels in
those countries. In a further eight countries that do not report their consumption of opioids,
the situation is likely similar, as governments participating in the international drug control
regime will not export opioids to those that do not. Thirteen other countries do not consume
enough opioids to treat even one percent of their terminal cancer and HIV/AIDS patients.
These countries are concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa, but are also found in Asia, the
Middle East and North Africa, and Central America.

Some of the world’s most populous countries have very poor availability of opioids for pain
relief. Consequently, in each of China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Russia, and South Africa, at
least 100,000 people die from cancer or HIV/AIDS each year without access to adequate
pain treatment. The combined suffering due to lack of opioid pain medicines worldwide is
staggering. Our calculations confirm that more than 3.5 million terminal cancer and HIV/AIDS
patients die each year without access to adequate pain treatment, a very conservative
estimate that assumes that all opioids are used to treat this patient group. It should be
considered merely an indicator of the enormous unmet need for pain treatment. In reality,
the limited opioids that are available are used to treat patients suffering pain from other
causes too. So the real number of terminal cancer and HIV/AIDS patients with untreated pain
must be higher, and many other patients with non-terminal cancer, HIV/AIDS, and with other
diseases are also suffering untreated pain.

In many of the 40 countries surveyed we found multiple barriers to palliative care in each of
the three areas. Only 11 of the countries surveyed have a national palliative care policy,
despite WHO’s recommendation that countries put in place such policies. Most of the
countries surveyed have inadequate opportunities for medical education in pain
management or palliative care and in four of the countries surveyed–Cameroon, Ethiopia,
Jordan, and Tanzania–no such education is available at all.

Thirty-three of the forty countries surveyed impose some kind of restrictive regulation on
morphine prescribing that is not required by the international drug conventions. Thirty-one
of the countries require that a special prescription form be used to prescribe morphine, and
fourteen require doctors to have a special license to prescribe morphine. Although WHO has
recommended that countries consider allowing nurses to prescribe morphine in order to improve
accessibility to this essential medicine, only three countries (the United States and Uganda) do so