1st Edition

Illicit Medicines in the Global South Public Health Access and Pharmaceutical Regulation

By Mathieu Quet Copyright 2022
    206 Pages 4 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This book investigates pharmaceutical regulation and the public health issue of fake or illicit medicines in developing countries.

    The book analyses the evolution of pharmaceutical capitalism, showing how the entanglement of market and health interests has come to shape global regulation. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in India, Kenya, and Europe, it demonstrates how large pharmaceutical companies have used the fight against fake medicines to serve their strategic interests and protect their monopolies, sometimes to the detriment of access to medicines in developing countries. The book investigates how the contemporary dynamics of pharmaceutical power in global markets have gone on to shape societies locally, resulting in more security-oriented policies. These processes highlight the key consequences of contemporary "logistical regimes" for access to health.

    Providing important insights on how the flows of commodities, persons, and knowledge shape contemporary access to medicines in the developing countries, this book will be of considerable interest to policy makers and regulators, and to scholars and students across sociology, science and technology studies, global health, and development studies.

    Introduction – Faith in Fakes?   Chapter 1 – In the beginning, a conflict  Part 1 - Pharmaceutical Geographies: the mutations of an industry  Chapter 2 – The pharmaceutical globalization  Chapter 3 – Selling at all costs  Part 2 - Pharmaceutical security, between public health and the market  Chapter 4 – The regulatory turn to security  Chapter 5 – The exercise of pharmaceutical control  Part 3 – Pharmaceutical logistics: commodities circulation and lifeforms  Chapter 6 — Logistic regimes and the exercise of power  Chapter 7 – Diverting flows, contesting power  Conclusion  Post-Scriptum

    Biography

    Mathieu Quet is a Senior Research Fellow in Sociology at Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, Ceped, Université de Paris, France. His current research focuses upon the entanglements of science, technology, and development in postcolonial contexts.