Understanding Drugs Markets

Abstract

Drawing on anthropology, historical sociology and social-epidemiology, this multidisciplinary book investigates how pharmaceuticals are produced, distributed, prescribed, consumed and regulated in order to construct a comprehensive understanding of the issues that drive pharmaceutical markets in the Global South today.Based on primary research conducted in Benin and Ghana, and additional data collected in Cambodia and the Ivory Coast, this volume uses artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) against malaria as a central case study. It highlights the influence of the countries' colonial and postcolonial history on their models for state regulation, production and distribution, explores the determining role transnational actors as well as industries from the North but also and increasingly from the South play in influencing local pharmaceutical markets and looks at the behaviour of healthcare professionals and individuals. Stepping back, the authors then unpick the pharmaceuticalization process and the multiple regulations at stake by looking at the workings of, and linkages between, (biomedical health) pharmaceutical systems, (representatives of companies) industries, actors in private and public distribution and consumer practices.Providing a thorough comparative analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of different pharmaceutical systems, it is an important contribution to the literature on pharmaceuticalization and the governance of medication. It is of interest to students, researchers and policymakers interested in medical anthropology, the sociology of health and illness, global health, healthcare management and pharmacy.

Antibiotics “dumped”: Negotiating Pharmaceutical Identities, Properties, and Interests in China–India Trade Disputes

“…Matthew Flynn shows how activism across state-society boundaries can push against the forces of neoliberal globalization and improve countries' "pharmaceutical autonomy" through access to patented drugs (2015,53). Carine Baxerres and Maurice Cassier (2022) demonstrate how colonial legacies and modern-day globalization shifts, including the flow of generic imports from Asia, have come to shape the making of pharmaceutical markets and modes of regulation in the Global South. However, the complicated relationship between the two major pharmaceutical ingredient-producing countries in the Global South-China and India-has not been thoroughly examined.…”

The Long Shadow of Fake Drugs and the Social Lives of Fake-ness

“…For us, however, the political economy of pharmaceuticals was not simply a matter of unequal access to medicines; this was also a field in which claims and counterclaims about counterfeit and fake-ness came to thrive. Here, our focus was on how official policy and public health discourse provided an important context for people to make sense of their own everyday pharmaceutical worlds as well as how people moved beyond official messaging (Baxerres and Cassier 2021;Biehl 2007 Nevertheless, we also noted how scholars have failed to explain how or why accusations of fake-ness carry such a charge beyond the particular historical and economic constellation that frames IP debates. It was at this point that we were able to start thinking with fakes, as we moved forward with the question of how to study pharmaceuticals in the world.…”