Abstract
Jason Nickerson and Amir Attaran examine the vast inequities in medical pain relief around the world and argue that the global control of licit narcotics be shifted from the International Narcotic Control Board to WHO.
Highlights
That prohibitionist drug laws often impede treating addiction or reducing its harms is already familiar to the public health community [3,4,5]
Two treaties contain the foundation for many national drug control laws: the 1961 United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs [8], and the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances [9]
N Given the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB)’s decades-long failure to administer the supply of controlled narcotics in accordance with clinical need, we propose that all legal responsibility for licit narcotics for medical and scientific purposes be shifted to the World Health Organization
Summary
The ‘‘war on drugs’’ has become increasingly controversial, as the political realization sinks in that it has wrought more harm than good. The data clearly illustrate that lack of equity and progress in the ‘‘war on pain’’ is not due to a few countries lacking the infrastructure to properly use or estimate their needs for controlled narcotics, but is caused by the systemic and enduring failure of INCB to fulfill its mandate in ‘‘assisting Governments in achieving, inter alia, a balance between supply and demand’’ [10]. To reject this conclusion is to continue. Embracing a cruel system in which persons needlessly lack treatment for pain, for the stubborn pursuit of narcotics prohibition, which others have found no longer desirable
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