Discussion of All Things Political

For much of the Western world, physical pain ends with a simple pill. Yet more than half the world's countries have little to no access to morphine, the gold standard for treating medical pain.

Freedom from Pain shines a light on this under-reported story. "For a victim of police torture, they will usually sign a confession and the torture stops," says Diederik Lohman of Human Rights Watch in the film. "For someone who has cancer pain, that torturous experience continues for weeks, and sometimes months on end."

Unlike so many global health problems, pain treatment is not about money or a lack of drugs, since morphine costs pennies per dose and is easily made. The treatment of pain is complicated by many factors, including drug laws, bureaucratic rigidity and commercial disincentives.

In India, the first stop in the film and the world's largest grower of medicinal poppy for developed countries, there are severe restrictions to the use of morphine domestically. In 27 out of 28 states in India, narcotics laws are so strict that doctors fear prescribing it, and patients literally scream for relief. Drug companies have little incentive to manufacture morphine for the domestic market because of reporting requirements and small profit margins.

In the Ukraine, the film reveals that access to pain medication is halted by outdated, Soviet-style bureaucracy, arbitrary limits on doses, and a lack of oral morphine. As a result, many patients experience prolonged bouts of untreated pain, particularly in rural areas. In the Ukraine, we learn that Artur, a former decorated KGB colonel suffering from prostate cancer, sleeps with a gun under his pillow - his only way out, should he decide his pain is too great. MORE

Millions of individuals worldwide suffer from acute or chronic painwithout adequate access to pain medication. The problem is particularly acute in the developing world, as Time Magazinechronicled last year:

Whether you will have access to pain treatment depends largely upon where you live. Africa, which has most of the world’s AIDS victims, is a painkiller wasteland. In India, more than a million cancer and AIDS sufferers die each year in extreme pain as cumbersome regulations and paperwork make it nearly impossible to get prescription painkillers. (India produces much of the world’s legal opium, yet nearly all of it is exported to Western pharmaceutical companies.)

The geography of pain relief is so skewed that the seven richest countries consume 84% of the world’s supply of legal opiates, according to the International Narcotics Control Board, an independent agency that enforces U.N. conventions. For the estimated 10 million people who are suffering from untreated pain, relief is often found only on the black market, or in death

This gaping unmet need and global inequity is becoming the subject of various calls for change, by pain experts, by cancer treatment advocates, by international organizations, and by the human rights community. As Brent Foster explains in this podcast, the reasons behind the inequitable global distribution of pain medication are complex – like many intractable global social problems that get too little attention by policymakers.

However, a significant (and solvable) aspect of the problem is simply the relationship of supply to demand: the need for analgesics like morphine far outweighs the available supply. In part, this is due to the fact that such analgesics are produced from opium, the sap of the poppy. Since the same plant extract can also be used to produce heroin, a significant amount of political effort is now being expended worldwide to actually inhibit, rather than encourage, opoid production. This fuels shortages of analgesics.MORE

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With his long grey beard and wistful expression, bin Laden became one of the most instantly recognisable people on the planet. His gaunt face stared out from propaganda videos and framed a US website offering a $25 million bounty. In 2007, that bounty was doubled.

Born in Saudi Arabia in 1957, one of more than 50 children of millionaire businessman Mohamed bin Laden, he lost his father while still a boy.

Osama's first marriage, to a Syrian cousin, came at the age of 17, and he is reported to have at least 23 children from at least five wives. Part of a family that made its fortune in the oil-funded Saudi construction boom, bin Laden was a shy boy and an average student, who took a degree in civil engineering. MORE

Oct. 15, 2001....After a week of debilitating strikes at targets across Afghanistan, the Taliban repeated an offer to hand over Osama bin Laden, only to be rejected by President Bush.

The offer yesterday from Haji Abdul Kabir, the Taliban's deputy prime minister, to surrender Mr bin Laden if America would halt its bombing and provide evidence against the Saudi-born dissident was not new but it suggested the Taliban are increasingly weary of the air strikes, which have crippled much of their military and communications assets.

The move came as the Taliban granted foreign journalists unprecedented access to the interior for the first time. Reporters were escorted to the village of Karam in southern Afghanistan, where the Taliban said up to 200 civilians were killed in an American bombardment last Wednesday.

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What was Bush spending time on in March, 2002, and if fact just a month after the 9/11 attacks? Surely you remember:

October 18, 2001 – The CIA writes a report titled, Iraq: Nuclear-Related Procurement Efforts. It quotes many of the Italian report's claims, but adds that the report of a completed deal is not corroborated by any other sources. (Senate Intelligence Cmte., Iraq 36-37, July 2004).

February 5, 2002 – The CIA's Directorate of Operations – the clandestine branch that employed Valerie Wilson – issues a second report including "verbatim text"of an agreement, supposedly signed July 5-6, 2000 for the sale of 500 tons of uranium yellowcake per year. (Senate Intelligence Cmte., Iraq 37, July 2004).MORE

In July 2006, we learned that the Bush administration closed its unit that had been hunting bin Laden.
In September 2006, Bush told Fred Barnes, one of his most sycophantic media allies, that an "emphasis on bin Laden doesn't fit with the administration's strategy for combating terrorism."
And don't even get me started on Bush's failed strategy that allowed bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora.MORE

What caused the oil spill? It seems workers on the Transocean Deepwater Horizon drilling rig (not owned by BP) were attempting to cap this new exploratory well when it suffered a "blow" causing the fire and sinking of the rig and the rupture of the line which brings extracted oil to the shore. Investigators will want to see what caused the explosion.

What are BP's offshore operations? BP took over two big American oil companies in the 1990's, ARCO and AMOCO which gives BP access to many U.S. oil fields and refineries. There has been a slew of new oil and gas finds in the Gulf of Mexico in deep water. BP, like many of its competitors, is drilling exploration wells there to gauge the oil and gas potential. The well, known as Mississippi Canyon (MC) Block 252, is in the 'Macondo prospect'. The well in question is 65 percent owned by BP and has other oil companies as minority partners. It's the norm these days for competitors to invest in these speculative wells.
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Britain's biggest oil company was tonight facing an environmental disaster expected to cost more than the Exxon Valdez tanker spill as thousands of tonnes of floating oil began to reach the US Gulf coast.

As several coastal states declared a state of emergency and dispatched clean-up crews, BP was desperately trying to stem not just the flow of crude from its damaged offshore platform but also to snuff out a growing political storm that has wiped billions of pounds off its share price.

President Barack Obama tonight sent officials from the US Department of Justice to monitor the company's handling of the crisis, while lawyers acting for victims of two earlier BP disasters in the US called for criminal charges and a ban on its activities there.

Fadel Gheit, an oil analyst at Oppenheimer & Co in New York, said the ultimate costs of dealing with the slick could rival that of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, which led to $3.5bn in clean-up costs and $5bn in legal and financial settlements. "This is a real pickle – it's a really challenging one. It's going to be difficult to choke off this spew of oil. Any solution is going to take time and I really think the cost here is going to be in the billions of dollars," he said.MORE

Crude oil sits on the surface of the water that has leaked from the Deepwater Horizon wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico on April 28, near New Orleans, Louisiana. US President Barack Obama started his key daily intelligence briefing Thursday with a 20-minute discussion of the oil spill, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

Photo Credit: AFP/Getty Images - Chris Graythen

For centuries, the Nile delta has been Egypt's bread-basket, a major source of sustenance for most of the country's 80 million people.

But today the delta - located on Egypt's northern coast, where the Nile river meets the Mediterranean sea, is facing rising sea levels that are drying out swaths of farmland.

Some are calling it an economic disaster that could eventually lead to widespread hunger in Egypt.

Al Jazeera's Barnaby Phillips reports from the Nile Delta under growing threats.

The Caribbean island nation of Haiti has been beset by a series of natural disasters in recent years, experiencing four devastating tropical storms in 2008.

Tuesday's 7.0-magnitude earthquake will only further complicate living conditions for residents of the poverty-stricken country where 80 per cent of Haiti's nearly nine million people live below the poverty line.

Al Jazeera's John Terrett reports. 13 Jan 10

Thousands of jobs in Sri Lanka's garment industry could be under threat because of the country's human rights record.
The European Union is meeting this week to consider changes to special privileges for the country's textile industry.
With 250,000 people still displaced by the fighting between the army and Tamil Tigers earlier this year, the EU says Colombo is not meeting its obligations on human rights.

The US defence secretary Robert Gates is visiting Japan as its new government signals it wants to review military ties with Washington.
While Tokyo says it is committed to the strategic alliance, Japan's newly-elected prime minister has said he wants a "more equal" relationship.
One of the key issues is the future of a major US military base on the island of Okinawa.
From there, Al Jazeera's Harry Fawcett takes a look at what's at stake.

Al Jazeera has evidence that civilians are increasingly being caught up in Pakistan's attempts to crush the Taliban in South Waziristan.
Exclusive pictures we have received show that those villagers who haven't fled the area, can't escape the shells and bullets.
Imran Khan reports.