Just to clarify, I’m not trying to promote or demote the cause. I’m aware that the cause is of interest to some EAs, and as someone in a good position to inform them, I thought something like this would help them make their own judgement :) I’m just sharing info and trying to be impartial.
Sorry if I my comments gave the impression that I thought it was low priority and financially inefficient. To reiterate I’ve withheld strong judgement on its priority, and I said I haven’t looked into its financial efficiency compared with other interventions. Because its importance/effectiveness depends heavily on ethical value preferences, both of these question are hard for me to take strong stances on.
My apologies for seeming contrary here, but I’m not taking an anti-corporate stance either. I made those points because the way you had originally put it made it seem like you believed that access to pain relief was unique in that corporate influence didn’t carry much risk compared with other causes. Unfortunately, it isn’t so. Of course pharma involvement is essential, yet the history of this very cause illustrates the risks. I’d agree with you that lack of corporate involvement is the missing link in some aspects of increasing access, but we should both be specific about the sectors we’re talking about to avoid appearing broadly pro-corporate or anti-corporate, which we both agree is unhelpful.
I haven’t got a wide enough grasp of the palliative care movement to say if it suffers from an anti-corporate agenda. ‘Global health’ in general tends to be pretty anti-pharma, and it’s hard to argue that the short-term externalities of the existing capitalistic model of drug development and production favours the ‘Global health’ agenda over the agenda of ‘health in the developed world’. So Global health’s culture of being anti-pharma is at least understandable, even if it relies on discounting the potentially-positive long-term externalities of the capitalistic model. It’s hard to say if access to pain relief/palliative care is more antagonistic to pharma than the rest of Global health. If it is suspicious of opioid manufacturers being involved in other aspects of the movement such as policy, then, without being too SJW, I actually think they actually have good reason to be so, given the history.
Hi Austen,
Just to clarify, I’m not trying to promote or demote the cause. I’m aware that the cause is of interest to some EAs, and as someone in a good position to inform them, I thought something like this would help them make their own judgement :) I’m just sharing info and trying to be impartial.
Sorry if I my comments gave the impression that I thought it was low priority and financially inefficient. To reiterate I’ve withheld strong judgement on its priority, and I said I haven’t looked into its financial efficiency compared with other interventions. Because its importance/effectiveness depends heavily on ethical value preferences, both of these question are hard for me to take strong stances on.
My apologies for seeming contrary here, but I’m not taking an anti-corporate stance either. I made those points because the way you had originally put it made it seem like you believed that access to pain relief was unique in that corporate influence didn’t carry much risk compared with other causes. Unfortunately, it isn’t so. Of course pharma involvement is essential, yet the history of this very cause illustrates the risks. I’d agree with you that lack of corporate involvement is the missing link in some aspects of increasing access, but we should both be specific about the sectors we’re talking about to avoid appearing broadly pro-corporate or anti-corporate, which we both agree is unhelpful.
I haven’t got a wide enough grasp of the palliative care movement to say if it suffers from an anti-corporate agenda. ‘Global health’ in general tends to be pretty anti-pharma, and it’s hard to argue that the short-term externalities of the existing capitalistic model of drug development and production favours the ‘Global health’ agenda over the agenda of ‘health in the developed world’. So Global health’s culture of being anti-pharma is at least understandable, even if it relies on discounting the potentially-positive long-term externalities of the capitalistic model. It’s hard to say if access to pain relief/palliative care is more antagonistic to pharma than the rest of Global health. If it is suspicious of opioid manufacturers being involved in other aspects of the movement such as policy, then, without being too SJW, I actually think they actually have good reason to be so, given the history.