Steelman · slot A
The patient-at-the-counter case
A humanitarian aid worker on the ground would argue —What we're seeing in Iranian pharmacies is the war reaching people who never picked up a weapon. Iran's healthcare system had genuinely been coping — local manufacturing covered most needs, and Iranian doctors are skilled and resourceful. But a war doesn't stay on the battlefield; it travels through supply chains. When shipping is disrupted, when active ingredients can't be imported, when even domestic production depends on inputs that no longer arrive, prices move. Officials are reporting some medicines doubling and others up tenfold. That is not an abstraction — it is a diabetic, a cancer patient, a child with epilepsy whose family now chooses between rent and a prescription. The humanitarian emergency is already here, in the pricing.