Pain

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

oxycontin

A lot of the junkies in my neighborhood are people who got hooked on oxycontin after an injury. Pain is a big motivator — people will do almost anything to make it stop:

For decades, the World Health Organization has designated pain treatment as afundamental human right. Nonetheless, about 75 percent of the global population still doesn’t have access to basic pain relief medications, according to a new report from United Nations researchers — which means that about 5.5 billion people may suffer in pain if they become chronically or terminally ill.

Human rights scholars consider the uneven access to effective pain medication to be “one of the most neglected realms of global public health.” Even as palliative care has advanced, billions of people around the world continue to needlessly suffer in the final stages of painful diseases like AIDS or cancer. And dealing with chronic pain can also lead to higher rates of psychological distress and disability.

The new report, which was prepared by the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), documents where pain medication is currently concentrated. More than 90 percent of the world’s morphine is consumed by just 17 percent of the global population, mostly Westerners living in wealthy places like the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Western Europe. Meanwhile, even as the developing world has recently seen a rise in the incidence of cancer, there aren’t many opioids left for them.
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Another oil train crash

~ susie

We need a better way to run the world than oil:

GALENA, Ill. (AP) — A BNSF Railway freight train containing 103 cars loaded with crude oil has derailed near the northern Illinois city of Galena.

According to railroad officials, the train derailed around 1:20 p.m. Thursday in a rural area where the Galena River meets the Mississippi.

Galena City Administrator Mark Moran said city fire crews responded to the derailment 3 miles south of the city.

“The report that came back to me from them is that eight tanker cars had left the track,” Moran told the Dubuque Telegraph Herald. “Two of those were still upright. The other six were not.”

Jo Daviess County Sheriff’s Sgt. Mike Moser says several cars have caught fire as a result of the derailment. Authorities are evacuating a 1 mile radius around the crash site as a precaution, according to the sheriff’s office.

Gov. Rauner has activated the State Incident Response Center and has sent personnel from several state agencies to the site of the derailment.

Firefighters could only access the derailment site by a bike path, said Assistant Fire Chief Bob Conley. They attempted to fight a small fire at the scene but were unable to stop the flames.

Firefighters had to pull back for safety reasons and were allowing the fire to burn itself out, Conley said. In addition to Galena firefighters, emergency and hazardous material responders from Iowa and Wisconsin were at the scene.

The East India Company was the original corporate raider

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

The opium trade began in the early 1700s as an official #monopoly of the #British East #India Company, which conquered India, and ran it on behalf of the British #Crown and the financiers operating through the City of #London . Indian-grown opium became a

I had dinner with a friend last night and he told me I had to read this Guardian article. So I did:

In many ways the EIC was a model of corporate efficiency: 100 years into its history, it had only 35 permanent employees in its head office. Nevertheless, that skeleton staff executed a corporate coup unparalleled in history: the military conquest, subjugation and plunder of vast tracts of southern Asia. It almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history. For all the power wielded today by the world’s largest corporations – whether ExxonMobil, Walmart or Google – they are tame beasts compared with the ravaging territorial appetites of the militarised East India Company. Yet if history shows anything, it is that in the intimate dance between the power of the state and that of the corporation, while the latter can be regulated, it will use all the resources in its power to resist.
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Landslide

~ susie

I still remember when I was on the board of a local folk club, and I was going through a pile of CDs sent to us by artists who wanted to perform. I told the president, “Hey, this is the only band in this pile I want to book.” He said, “Who the hell’s gonna come see a band called the Dixie Chicks?”

Ferguson report

~ susie

Even though I know better — even though I know how cops think, and how politicians use them, and the racism that overrides all of it– I was still emotionally overwhelmed listening to Eric Holder summarize the systematic oppression of Ferguson residents in the Justice Department report today.

Truly overwhelming, all the more so because we know it’s not just Ferguson.