Rights group welcome par nod to ease curbs on morphine

A leading human rights group today hailed Parliament's nod to easing the curbs on availability of pain-killing morphine, saying it will spare millions of people from the indignity of needlessly suffering severe pain.
"The revised Drug Act is very good news for people with pain in India," said Diederik Lohman, senior health researcher at Human Rights Watch. "These changes will help spare millions of people the indignity of suffering needlessly from severe pain."
The amendments to the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act (the Drug Act) eliminate archaic rules that obligated hospitals and pharmacies to obtain four or five licenses, each from a different government agency, every time they wanted to purchase strong pain-killing medicines, HRW said.

The hard-to-follow rules resulted in virtual disappearance of morphine, an essential medicine against strong pain, from hospitals, including from most specialised cancer centres.
In the seven years following the introduction of the Drug Act in 1985, morphine use in India had plummeted by 97 percent due to these complications, adding to the suffering of the patients.
HRW had estimated the quantity of morphine India used in 2008 was sufficient for just four percent of patients with advanced cancer who required it.
The Rajya Sabha approved the amendments yesterday. The Lok Sabha had passed them a day earlier.