Promoting compassionate governance
Preventing intense suffering
The Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering (OPIS) is a non-profit think-and-do tank promoting the prevention and alleviation of the intense suffering of all sentient beings as a top ethical priority.
COMPASSIONATE GOVERNANCE
We develop and communicate guiding principles for compassionate governance and systemic change, so that the prevention and alleviation of intense suffering are given highest priority.
In 2025 we released a wide-ranging publication titled Compassionate Governance: A Strategic Guide to Preventing and Alleviating Global Suffering that pulls together wisdom and essential insights from several fields of expertise and offers numerous recommendations for governance, international cooperation and policies.
SOLUTIONS TO SUFFERING
We promote effective, evidence-based solutions to specific causes of suffering in both humans and non-human animals, including access to effective pain relief as well as the elimination of factory farming.
We helped launch a national palliative care program in Burkina Faso and successfully advocated for Canada to grant access to psilocybin for a patient with excruciating cluster headaches. We work on suffering metrics and measurement, concern for suffering prevention within AI alignment, and ensuring the representation of all suffering beings in citizens’ assembly deliberations. We also promote solutions that could bring peace to Israel-Palestine.
Latest News
-
OPIS Partnership with TheraPsil to Support Cluster Headache Patients in Canada in Accessing Psilocybin
OPIS is pleased to announce that it established a partnership earlier this year with TheraPsil to support cluster headache patients in Canada in accessing psilocybin. TheraPsil is a Canadian non-profit organisation that has already successfully petitioned the Canadian government to provide section 56 exemptions to end-of-life patients so that they can legally use psilocybin for the medical…
-
OPIS Policy Paper on Legalising Psilocybin for Cluster Headaches
OPIS has released a policy paper that calls for legalising access to psilocybin and related substances for the treatment of cluster headaches, one of the most excruciating conditions known to medicine. Policy recommendations include allowing doctors to prescribe currently restricted substances such as psilocybin, LSD, DMT and 5-MeO-DALT to patients with cluster headaches and ensuring…
-
Burkina Faso Takes Major Step Forward on Palliative Care and Pain Relief with Successful Conference
The national conference on pain relief and palliative care in Burkina Faso, which OPIS co-organised last week on 2-3 December with Hospice Burkina and the Ministry of Health, achieved its objectives. Most importantly, the Minister of Health, Prof. Léonie Claudine Lougue/Sorgho (pictured above), who delivered a speech and met a small group of participants for…
-
OPIS Advocates at UN Human Rights Council for Access to Morphine
Millions of children and adults in low- and middle- income countries, inflicted with terminal or life-threatening illnesses and suffering from severe physical pain, are unable to access morphine, an effective treatment that is easy and inexpensive to produce. As a call to action to address this devastating but solvable situation, on 14 March 2018 OPIS…