I'd like to share with you what we've been up to recently in pursuit of our mission.
OPIS was founded in June 2016 based on a simple, essential principle: that intense suffering is a devastating phenomenon crying out for relief, and preventing it must become society's highest priority.
We are taking two parallel approaches:
Advocating for solutions to specific causes of intense suffering
Advocating for the prevention of intense suffering of all sentient beings as the core ethical priority for decision-making and governance
We have good reason to believe that most people will support our vision when shown the reality of intense suffering and taken through the solid arguments for its prioritisation.
Relief of severe physical pain in humans
Morphine for terminal cancer and other causes of severe pain
The lack of access to morphine for millions of terminal cancer patients and others suffering from severe pain in most lower-income countries received a boost in attention after a major report in the medical journal The Lancet two years ago. We decided to take on this cause as it has clear, straightforward solutions that could benefit from increased advocacy. In March 2018 we held an expert panel event at the UN Human Rights Council on “Ending the Agony: Access to Morphine as an Ethical and Human Rights Imperative”, in partnership with London-based International Doctors for Healthier Drug Policies (IDHDP). Our engagement on this issue and our creation of a widely distributed advocacy guide have given us recognition as a new international voice on the subject of access to effective pain medication. We have a good cooperation with several international palliative care organisations, including IAHPC, with whom we expect to attend the next WHO Executive Board Meeting in 2020.
Following these activities, we were approached by Hospice Burkina, the palliative care association of the West African country of Burkina Faso, to support them in making palliative care and access to morphine a reality in their country. We launched a crowdfunding campaign to make a national conference possible, exceeding our target thanks to the many people who donated. Hospice Burkina then presented the proposal we had developed together to the Ministry of Health. As a result, the conference is taking place on 2-3 December 2019, in collaboration with the Ministry of Health and an opening speech by the Minister of Health Prof. Léonie Claudine Lougue/Sorgho. Close to 100 stakeholders from Burkina Faso are expected as well as a few international speakers, including the legendary Dr. Anne Merriman, founder of Hospice Africa, who has played a determining role in making oral liquid morphine and palliative care available to thousands of patients in Uganda and throughout much of Africa (see this recent BBC reportage and interview with her). OPIS has played a key role in drafting a strategy for facilitating access to morphine in Burkina Faso and in conceiving the second day of the conference as a collaborative workshop that will help refine and improve on the existing draft strategies for education, legislation and access.
We are hoping the conference will inspire other palliative care initiatives in West Africa and elsewhere. Our efforts will continue after the conference, providing support to other countries and organisations on this major cause of preventable human suffering and encouraging governments to make it a priority.
Cluster headaches
Recently, as the result of research by OPIS Advisor Andrés Gómez Emilsson, we have been addressing the issue of cluster headaches, a horrendously painful condition that affects about 1 in 1000 people with often multiple daily, hour-long attacks for months on end, but which, based on solid evidence, can often be successfully prevented or treated with several chemical substances of the tryptamine class, such as psilocybin, LSD and DMT. Strict drug policies in most countries, aligned with UN conventions that have characterised drug use as a criminal issue rather than as a potential health issue, mean that access to potentially effective therapies is difficult or impossible for most cluster headache sufferers. We want to help ensure that no one suffers needlessly from the agony of cluster headaches when solutions are available.
One approach is to raise awareness among physicians and cluster headache sufferers of treatment options. We also consider this a striking example of the need for more compassionate drug policies. We have been establishing contacts with other organisations such as the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC), the Norwegian Association for Safer Drug Policies and the Beckley Foundation, with the goal of advocating for rational, evidence-based drug policies through creative campaigning. Such changes would help prevent a great deal of human suffering, in addition to that caused by cluster headaches. This will also be an opportunity to disseminate and further build on a drug policy report written for the Effective Altruism Foundation in 2016, which we recently helped update.
Animal rights
Although we have not yet carried out a specific campaign related to animal rights, we have written articles and a book and given talks and media appearances in English, French and Spanish, where we call attention to the massive abuse of animals and the need to fight speciesism. We already bring up non-human animal suffering at every opportunity, including in our work on human suffering. As one small if symbolic example, we pressed for the preparation of vegan food at our conference on palliative care in Burkina Faso, despite this being relatively unknown territory for animal advocacy. As we move more into advocacy for ethical governance, non-human animal suffering will receive increased focus.
Suffering as a focus of advocacy
The broad, principled approach of calling attention to all intense suffering is fundamental to OPIS’s mission. When those we connect with - other organisations, activists, politicians and influencers - grasp the urgency of preventing all intense suffering, they will be more inclined to support a range of policy proposals and even changes in governance mechanisms that make it a top priority. It also means that we can bring together diverse organisations to form coalitions to support each other’s aims, in the interest of the common goal of preventing suffering – an approach we share with our sister organisation the Algosphere. In fact, several members of the OPIS team are also active on other, related projects connected with genital mutilation, promoting vegan options, ending animal abuse, and compassionate global governance, and there is already good cross-pollination between projects.
Ongoing and planned projects
Our visualisation of world suffering data is ongoing. Collecting good data and suffering estimates is a tricky and imprecise exercise, but we expect to complete this project in the next months. It will provide a broad overview of the sources and approximate scale of suffering on our planet, which will help in adapting the priorities of policymakers, altruists and activists.
We are also planning a white paper with some of the policy implications of our suffering-focused ethical framework, with input from experts from a variety of disciplines.
Once these two projects have been completed, we will turn more of our attention to creative, effective ways of getting the messages out and engaging with various influencers, other think tanks and NGOs, political organisations, politicians and the general public.
We already have a nascent collaboration with UK-based Compassion in Politics, a small team working to raise the level of discourse in British politics and, more substantially, pass a "Compassion Act" to guarantee the minimum wellbeing of future generations, in the UK and also elsewhere. They have already secured the support of many MPs, and we are both interested in working together to promote specific policy proposals aimed at preventing suffering.
An excellent article in New Humanist magazine that mentions OPIS, about the problem of lack of access to morphine: "The other opioid crisis" from December 2018
A new book by OPIS Associate Manu Herrán titled ”Seres que sienten" ("Sentient beings”) in which he exposes the main arguments and evidence demonstrating sentience in animals, and therefore their moral relevance (currently just in Spanish)
A list of references on the OPIS website related to the ethic of non-suffering
Spread our vision and support us!
Please consider forwarding this email to any people or organisations in your network who share our vision or might be interested in our project areas. Anyone can be added to our mailing list from the bottom of our website or be removed from it by clicking the unsubscribe link below.
And finally... Donations are incredibly important for supporting our work and allowing us to develop new projects aimed at changing policy. Most of what we have done until now has been on a volunteer basis, with just basic costs covered by some private donations and self-financing to get things moving. We are grateful for support that will help us to sustainably pursue our mission.
Best wishes,
Jonathan Leighton, PhD
Executive Director, Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering preventsuffering.org
