Canadian researchers say international drug control officials should hand over their power to the World Health Organization.
The report released Tuesday says that under current rules, there are too many countries scraping by with little access to basic painkillers.
The University of Ottawa researchers condemned the International Narcotics Control Board, a global body that plays a dual role in doling out medicine around the world while policing the flow of illegal drugs.
While Canada offers its ailing patients morphine, oxycodene and fentanyl, other countries from Haiti to Iran, carry out surgeries, amputations and other severe medical procedures without offering any pain relief, says lead researcher Amir Attaran.
“We are neither consuming a ridiculously high or ridiculously low amount of (narcotics) relative to other rich countries. But relative to poorer countries, we’re kings,” he said.
Attaran, a law and medicine professor at the University of Ottawa, collaborated with his colleague Jason Nickerson in the study. Their complete findings were published in the medical journal PLoS (the Public Library of Science).
Canadians receive codeine for wisdom teeth removal, for example. If they’re battling the final stages of cancer, they do so with morphine to help ease the pain.
On the other hand, following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, which marks its second anniversary Thursday, people whose limbs were crushed in the rubble were being amputated on without any painkillers.
“In Canada, your wisdom teeth can get more pain relief than a woman in West Africa suffering from breast cancer. We’re the exception here. Most of the world, if you’re a cancer patient, you die in pain,” Attaran said.
While Attaran says Canada faces “no shortage” of painkillers, Haiti, with a population of 9.7 million people, is only allocated 671 grams of morphine, 117 grams of codeine, 83 grams of fentanyl and 309 grams of pethidine.
Some countries receive as low as 1 gram of morphine a year for the entire population.
A gram, Attaran estimates, would be sufficient supply for a cancer patient for about two weeks.
The report suggests that under current estimates, more than 80 per cent of the world’s population lacks access to basic pain relief.
That’s because “cumbersome, restrictive” drug laws enforced by the INCB block the transfer of medicine to poorer nations.
The INCB, a United Nations entity, was established in 1961 in the wake of the global “war on drugs” to help limit the production and circulation of illegal drugs while simultaneously ensuring adequate levels are distributed for medical purposes.
“The controls now basically give priority to trying to eradicate illicit drugs even if that means strangling patients’ access to legitimate pain relief,” Attaran said.
The Canadian researchers are calling on the INCB to shift their drug distribution responsibilities to the World Health Organization, the UN’s public health arm.
“Transferring the public health responsibility for controlled medicines from INCB to WHO would end the impossibly contradictory situation . . .,” the authors wrote in the report.
Attaran said his team made calls and sent emails to the INCB to provide in detail how it decides to allocate narcotics, but the organization did not provide a response.
Globalnews.ca sent a media request for an interview to the organization but did not hear back Tuesday.
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