Across Britain today, people will take prescriptions to pharmacies and be told they can’t be fulfilled. After hearing a lifetime of speeches about the miracle of the NHS, they’ll find the miracle is out of stock. The National Pharmacy Association (NPA) warned earlier this month that we are short of medicines, with the shortages ‘some of the most severe the UK has experienced’.
Life is a muddle, and the best we can do is battle endlessly against imperfect trade-offs. That’s the lesson to be read in the NPA’s announcement, if it’s one you’re willing to see. Little in the world is an undiluted good, not even the modern decline of premature mortality. There are people who would find the downside to an England victory in the World Cup, although probably only Scots and Welsh.
Only politics, from which we suffer a surplus, deals with the fiction of radical simplicity. Solutions are proposed as though they have no drawbacks, opposing alternatives as though they offer no benefits.
Drug shortages can be abolished only through overproduction and stockpiling
Privately, of course, politicians speak of the art of the possible, and it is certainly to the art of the possible that administrators and regulators, like entrepreneurs and workers, need to look. Modern shortages aren’t unprecedented – not least because before the first antibiotics in the 1930s, our domestic medicine cabinets were free of anything much that actually helped, besides laxatives and opium – but the problems are real.
