“It was like hearing someone being tortured. She was not like a human being: she could only think about the pain. A few million people in India go through that agony. At least 2 million people with cancer and many millions with other diseases who simple suffer and suffer, and their whole family suffers with them, until death eventually relieves them of the misery. Some people commit suicide because of the pain, sometimes people come and beg please kill my husband or my mother or my son, I can’t bear to see this. I think it’s dreadful what people have to go through which converts them from human beings to some sort of animals.” – Dr M.R. Rajagopal Palliative Care physician, Trivandrum

Producer Mukti Jain Campion investigates why, despite producing most of the world’s medical morphine, India’s own people have virtually no access to it and how a hospice in Shrewsbury is helping pioneers of the Indian palliative care movement to overcome the ignorance that surrounds this vital pain relieving-drug.
BBC Radio 4, Monday March 3rd 2008 at 9pm and online at www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 for seven days after broadcast