If the "civilised" treat their own people in this way, then one should understand the indifference to the 400,000 Iraqi children or the similar number killed by a Syrian regime they did not want to remove. Or, the 500,000 to a million killed in a genocide in Rwanda. Mechanisms have included sanctions, aid, debt, celebrities "saving Africa and defending human rights" ... There are exceptions though when there is a profit to make out of some people or a demographic need combined with hostorical guilt (Germany).

In the mid-19th century British capitalism deliberately legalised opium trading in China that turned millions of Chinese into addicts and made British commerce huge profits. The Chinese fought an unsuccessful war against the British to stop the trade.

Well, in the 21st century there is another legal opium trade operating in the heart of America. It has produced an opioid epidemic across working-class middle America. And it has been created by big pharmaceutical companies and profit-making doctors to produce opiate addiction on a grand scale.

Sam Quinones gives all the devastating details in his book, Dreamland.

As Marilyn Gates, Professor of Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, comments: "we have been reminded of the insidious and pernicious nature of opiate addiction and that Big Pharma and even doctors can be more concerned with profits and managed care than patient well-being".

The answer of state governments to this has been incarceration, not rehabilitation. Addicts with additional psychiatric conditions are particularly vulnerable.