The “war on drugs” you did not hear about: the global crisis of access to essential anesthesia medications

Excerpt

The review in this issue of the Journal by Nickerson et al. is a thorough, sobering description of how complex international drug regulatory systems—influenced more by politics than by evidence-based assessment of benefits and harm—result in devastating effects on patients in the poorest countries of the world.1 These laws, developed with the goal of restricting illicit drug use, instead result in a lack of access to essential medicine that affects only low- and middle-income countries. Other authors have found that these drug laws that were intended to improve public health have resulted in “lethal violence, communicable disease transmission, discrimination, forced displacement, unnecessary physical pain, and the undermining of people’s right to health”.2‐4 …