From Russia with Pain
/By Pat Anson, Editor
If you’re a pain sufferer who has difficulty getting prescriptions written and filled for opioid pain medication – be glad you don’t live in Russia.
In Russia, even terminally ill cancer patients have trouble getting opioids. And some have committed suicide rather than spend their remaining days in pain.
In February, 11 cancer patients committed suicide in Moscow alone, according to a special report published in Meduza, a web-based Russian media outlet that operates out of Latvia.
“There’s no end to the pain. It won’t stop next morning, or tomorrow, or the day after. It won’t disappear if a tooth is pulled out or if drops of medicine are squeezed into your ear. If you don’t relieve the pain somehow, it eats you up right to the end. It’s absolutely unbearable,” one cancer patient was quoted as saying.
Getting painkillers in Russia is difficult for everyone, whether they have cancer or not. It can take up to three days for adults, according to Meduza, and for children up to 12 days.
Here’s what cancer patients have to do:
First they visit a general practitioner at a clinic, who will assess their pain levels and send them to an oncologist. The oncologist will then write up an assessment and send the patient back to the general practitioner, who will write up a prescription. The head of the clinic must then stamp the prescription, which is only valid for five days.
Clinics typically forward prescriptions to pharmacies at 4 pm – so if a patient doesn’t have a prescription approved by then, they have to wait until the next day.
All of these steps leading to long lines at the clinic, the oncologist and the pharmacy. The final indignity for patients is that they have to return the used containers and packaging from their previous medication to get a new one.
Adding to the stigma is that narcotic painkillers have long been deemed unnecessary in Russia – dating back to Soviet times. Patients who use the drugs are often treated like addicts and doctors who prescribe narcotics are sometimes punished as criminals.
This has led to a thriving black market for painkillers and soaring prices for pain medication that are sold legally. The government is reported to be conducting checks of pharmacies in major cities to protect against price gouging.
Meduza’s story about the suicides sparked a backlash and a heavy-handed attempt by the government to prevent other websites from reporting on poor access to pain medication. The pretext given for the censorship was a 2012 Russian law that prohibits online content advocating suicide and drug use. Any website violating the law can be blocked by the government.
One site was told to delete copy that simply said: "The wife of the deceased explained that her husband suffered from constant pain because of cancer and often said he was tired of being sick."
Moscow's deputy mayor disputed the notion that the suicides were in any way connected to lack of access to painkillers -- claiming that at least seven of the 11 people who killed themselves were unaware they had cancer.
The deputy head of the Russian Federation Council's constitutional law committee disputed the notion that forcing websites to delete information would prevent more suicides.
"The information about the reasons for suicides by cancer sufferers is socially significant in this case,” Senator Konstantin Dobrynin told the state news agency RIA Novosti. “Covering up such information could lead to even more victims."
The World Health Organization ranks Russia 38th out of 43 European countries in access to painkillers, but the problem isn’t unique to Russia.
According to one recent study, pain medications such as morphine and codeine were not widely available or virtually non-existent in a dozen eastern European countries stretching from Poland to Turkey.
