Translated material
Legalized pain
On February 11, the Minister of Health Veronika Skvortsova ordered to conduct an audit: whether the proper medical assistance was provided with the cancer-patient counterail Vyacheslav Apanasenko. 
Apanasenko committed suicide due to the lack of painkillers. This is horror! And for the first time I ran into this horror three years ago.
My friend’s mother was discharged from the hospital with inconceivated cancer exactly before the May holidays. She was appointed to receive painkillers in the oncology center at the place of residence - they are not given them in their hands in the hospital. The woman’s metastases were already in many bones, and she could not do even these medicines even for several hours. On April 30, mother and son could not get the necessary drugs in the dispensary, the medical staff told them that a doctor would come on May 10 and decide whether anesthesia is needed at all. On May 2, a friend called me with the question: "How to chop heroin?" He said that his friends from the Federal Drug Control Service (FSKN) promised to give him drugs withdrawn by drug police.
Another similar case was this year. A good friend called: her mother was discharged on December 30, and the district oncologist did not prescribe drugs. The neighbor from below soon could not stand screams, because my mother just climbed onto the wall, came and offered to get any drugs.
The story of Admiral Apanasenko is one of the thousands, it just received wide publicity.
The point is not that some sad doctors enjoy the patient's torment. The problem itself was created by officials of the FSKN and the Ministry of Health. The instructions that they developed jointly jointly complicated the receipt of drug -patient narcotic anesthesia about five years ago. And doctors began to fear criminal prosecution for supposedly unreasonably prescribed drugs. "
It’s easier to punish a doctor and report than to conduct operational measures for the search for drug dealers
”So, my colleague, an anesthetist-resuscitator of the maternity hospital Elvira Gatkovskaya from Petrozavodsk, paid for making the patient anesthesia, did not utilize the Ampulament with the remnants, but left it in the refrigerator for her girlfriend-she had to undergo an operation to a sick cat (narcotic drugs are prohibited in veterinary clinics). They accidentally found a criminal case, and the prosecutor's office demanded six years of the real term.
There are absolutely absurd situations. One of my patients was prescribed a patch, from which morphine is slowly released. For drug addicts, he is useless, from him it is impossible to isolate and introduce a drug into a vein. So, six hours after the use of this patch, a nurse came to him, torn it off and carried it to another patient. This is not just unethical - it's just beyond the facet of common sense.
In response to mass complaints, Minister Veronika Skvortsova issued an order to simplify the access of cancer patients to drug anesthetic. But in the regions there are local Ministry of Health that regulate the circulation of narcotic drugs with their own instructions and orders. And only recently, the director of the FSKN Viktor Ivanov instructed to urgently correct these instructions, simplifying the procedure for issuing narcotic painkillers.
After all, it’s easier to punish the doctor and report that there is a fight against drugs than to conduct operational measures to search for drug dealers. The authorities stirred only after the shot of Admiral Apanasenko. And the fact that before that thousands of patients died in terrible torment, they did not give a damn.
Photos: Victor Bartenev/ITAR-TASS/Interpress