Anthropology of Pharmaceuticals

Over the past decade and a half, psychedelic drug-induced experiences have been returning to psychiatry as promising new healing modalities. The case of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy can inform how we think about the context of drug use because psychedelics are commonly considered to be sensitive to the ‘[mind] set and setting’ of their use. As such, epistemic and therapeutic concerns among psychedelic researchers and therapists over the importance of set and setting are interwoven. My ethnography of psychedelic therapeutics both inside and outside of the clinical trials on the east coast of the United States from 2015 to 2019 suggests that there are added political and economic imperatives to contain psychedelic use. Working with this insight, I suggest psychedelic researchers and therapists are producing immense experiences that tend to overflow the attempts at their containment. I also identify two qualities central to the set and setting of the emerging modality of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. The first is a labor of protecting spaces which reveals an attentiveness to disconnection that can be read as in tension with the more commonly evoked emphasis on connection found within psychedelic discourses. The second is how psychedelic experiences (as ‘mind-manifesting’) are understood to reflect the self, and in so doing re-present epistemic disagreements about the nature of the self thus reflected. Taken together, I propose that these two qualities of psychedelic containment offer an analytics for reading the contemporary cultural politics of psychedelic use.

In 2002, following reports of adverse side effects experienced by Japanese patients
taking the antipsychotic medication, Zyprexa, Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare required Eli Lilly & Co. to place a new warning label on its drug and to send out a ‘doctors letter’. The company feared that this would threaten its sales of Zyprexa not just in Japan, but globally. US court documents from suits against Lilly in 2006 show how Lilly focused their scientific and sales attention not on the reported side effects of their drug, but on how prescribing physicians perceived the side effect profile of the drug. The company actively pursued a strategy of creating a shadow science to drown out noncompany-sponsored (and competitors’) research reports on the side effects of the drug. I draw on ethnographic research in Japan to describe how Lilly dealt with the threat to the brand equity of Zyprexa there, and how they sought to keep their global marketing program for the drug on course. I conclude with a discussion of the encounter between the global marketing aspiration of the firm and the contingencies associated with the Japanese environment in particular.

This review discusses a growing body of scholarship at the intersection of anthropology and science and technology studies (STS) that examines how drugs are rendered efficacious in laboratories, therapeutic settings, and everyday lives. This literature foregrounds insights into how commercial interests and societal concerns shape the kinds of pharmaceutical effects that are actualized, and how some efficacies are blocked in response to moral concerns. The work brought together here reveals how regulatory institutions and health policy makers seek to stabilize pharmaceutical actions while, on the front lines of care, pharmacists, health workers and users tinker with dosages and indications to tailor pharmaceutical actions to specific circumstances. We show that there is no pure (pharmaceutical) object that precedes its socialization. Pharmaceuticals are not “discovered”; they are made and re-made in relation to shifting contexts. The review outlines five key areas of ethnographic and STS research that examines such fluid drugs.

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Europe, in this paper I examine what people within Pentecostal faith communities do with pharmaceuticals. As shown by research on 'the social life of medicines,' medical objects such as pills and capsules can be used in a number of ways. It has been argued that the 'thingness' of pharmaceuticals makes them significant objects in social exchanges. Within Pentecostal practice the connecting and communicative aspects of pharmaceuticals gain another dimension. Pills and substances can become points of contact for God and facilitate the experience of God's influence

In the contemporary United States, matters of life and health have become key political concerns. Important to this politics of life is the desire to overcome racial inequalities in health; from heart disease to diabetes, the populations most afflicted by a range of illnesses are racialized minorities. The solutions generally proposed to the problem of racial health disparities have been social and environmental in nature, but in the wake of the mapping of the human genome, genetic thinking has come to have considerable influence on how such inequalities are problematized. Racial Prescriptions explores the politics of dealing with health inequities through targeting pharmaceuticals at specific racial groups based on the idea that they are genetically different. Drawing on the introduction of BiDil to treat heart failure among African Americans, this book contends that while racialized pharmaceuticals are ostensibly about fostering life, they also raise thorny questions concerning the biologization of race, the reproduction of inequality, and the economic exploitation of the racial body.

Engaging the concept of biopower in an examination of race, genetics and pharmaceuticals, Racial Prescriptions will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists and scholars of science and technology studies with interests in medicine, health, bioscience, inequality and racial politics.

Le sommaire de ce numéro http://www.john-libbey-eurotext.fr/fr/ revues/sante pub/sss/sommaire.md?type= text.html Montrouge, le 06/06/2012 Emmanuelle Simon Vous trouverez ci-après le tiréà part de votre article au formatélectronique (pdf) : « Médicaments néotraditionnels » : une catégorie pertinente ? À propos d'une recherche anthropologique au Bénin paru dans Sciences Sociales et Santé, 2012, Volume 30, Numéro 2 John Libbey Eurotext Ce tiréà part numérique vous est délivré pour votre propre usage et ne peutêtre transmisà des tiers qu'à des fins de recherches personnelles ou scientifiques. En aucun cas, il ne doit faire l'objet d'une distribution ou d'une utilisation promotionnelle, commerciale ou publicitaire. Tous droits de reproduction, d'adaptation, de traduction et de diffusion réservés pour tous pays. Résumé. Impulsés dans les années 1970 par des politiques de santé publique nationales et internationales, les « médicaments traditionnels améliorés » circulent aujourd'hui tant dans le secteur public que le secteur privé de santé au Bénin. Cet article s'intéresse à la rencontre entre ces traitements issus du secteur traditionnel des soins et les traitements nouvellement importés provenant du secteur alternatif des sociétés occiden-

Ethnographic inquiry into Ayurvedic commodification in Kerala revealed the prevalence of a distinct regional pharmaceutical market dominated by physician-manufacturers, oriented towards supplying classical medicines to Ayurvedic doctors. This stands in sharp contrast to mainstream Ayurveda that is observed to have undergone biomedicalization and pharmaceuticalization. This paper argues that Kerala's classical-medicine-centric pharmaceutical market constitutes an alternative modernity because it provided Kerala Ayurveda with a different route to modernization impervious to the biomedical regime, as well as endowing it with the institutional power to safeguard its regional identity. Although physician-entrepreneurs are its key architects, it is sustained by value regimes shaped by a unique regional medico-cultural milieu. Even when industrially produced, classical medicines remain embedded within Ayurveda's socio-technical network; unlike proprietary drugs sold as individual product-identities through non-Ayurvedic channels, they travel together as a pharmacopeia, distributed through exclusive doctor-mediated agencies. This clinic-centric distribution format is best conceptualized as an opensource business model as it made low-margin generics viable by packaging them with therapies and services. Besides ensuring better access and affordability, it provided resistance to pharmaceuticalization and intellectual property concentration. By keeping the doctor in the loop, it prevented medicines from degenerating into de-contextualized commodities; the service component of Ayurveda therein preserved went on become the unique selling point in the health-tourism market. The tourism-inspired proliferation of Brand Kerala eventually triggered a paradigm shift in mainstream Ayurveda shifting focus from 'pharmaceuticals' to 'services' and from 'illness' to 'wellness'. Furthermore, interacting with hybrid Ayurvedas in transnational markets, Kerala Ayurveda co-produces new alterities countervailing the structurally dominant biomedical paradigm.

Aim: The pharmaceutical industries spend a significant amount on
the advertisement and promotion of their products, of which the
largest division is spent on the visits of sales representatives of
these industries to the physicians. The pharmaceutical sales
representatives educate the physicians about the advancements in
the medical products of their companies and hence are of pivotal
importance in the prescribing behavior of physicians. To assess
their knowledge with respect to their qualification was the
objective of the study.
Methods: A quantitative cross sectional survey was designed
targeting the medical sales representatives (MSRs) in Pakistan
with a probability sampling technique. It was sent to 716 MSRs all
over Pakistan. 691 were returned giving a response rate of 96.5%.
Cross tabulation and Chi square test X2 was used. . Statistical
significance was accepted at p values <0.05.
Results: It was found that almost a third of MSRs (30.9%) were
pharmacist and the rest (69.1%) were non pharmacists. In regard
to their source of knowledge the pharmacist MSR mainly
consulted literature (50%) while the non pharmacist relied on
marketing promotional materials (55%). Majority (92%) of MSR’s
were aware of the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of
drugs however the 60% of non pharmacist and 4% of the
pharmacist MSR’s were unaware of the adverse drug reactions.
Regarding the beneficence of adverse drug reactions 91% of
pharmacist and 55% of non pharmacist gave negative answer. The
ethical way of promotion was considered knowledge by 92% of
MSR’s, while for black box warnings 90% of pharmacist MSR’s
were aware while 61% of non pharmacist MSR’s were unaware.
Conclusion: It is more beneficial if the MSR has a sound
expertise regarding the therapeutics and well as other vital features
of the drug. A pharmacist is a better choice for this purpose.

In July 2012, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the commercial use of an antiretroviral pharmaceutical to prevent HIV. This method of preventing HIV is known as HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). The single pharmaceutical product approved for commercial use as PrEP is manufactured by Gilead Sciences, Inc (Foster City, CA) and sold under the brand name Truvada. This dissertation traces the development, commercialization, and implementation of Truvada as PrEP from an anthropological perspective, including by exploring several elements of the political economy of health, such as processes of innovation in drug development. The dissertation also displays how this novel method to prevent HIV emerges from a long history of HIV prevention in which the intimacy of ‘at risk’ individuals has been managed through techniques of discipline, including those that encourage individuals to engage only in ‘safe’ sex and to speak to physicians and investigators about their ‘risky’ practices. At the same time, this historical and ethnographic research marks an important shift in the value systems of antiretroviral markets, which once stitched together public interests (of the state and its citizen) and private interests (of the pharmaceutical industry) through the moral imperative to save life and are now strengthening public-private partnerships in order to secure health and manage sexual pleasure. By following the product life of Truvada from early moments in the antiretroviral market when Gilead obtained licenses for its pharmaceutical components into present day clinical care, where providers are prescribing Truvada as PrEP to augment sexual pleasure, this account brings together intimacy and innovation to show how they have become intertwined and inseparable. Thus, the dissertation argues PrEP is an intimate innovation.

Resumo: Apesar da risperidona e quetiapina não estarem disponível nos protocolos clínicos terapêuticos do SUS para o tratamento de Sintomas Psico lógicos e Co mportamentais da Demência (SPCD), ambos são amplamente utilizados pelos pacientes com doença de Alzheimer (DA) e seu uso está associado às alterações fisio metabólicas. Propôs-se avaliar o perfil lipíd ico de pacientes com DA e SPCD em uso de risperidona ou quetiapina, atendidos pelo Centro de Referência do Idoso de Araraquara. Trata-se um estudo prospectivo, experimental, não randomizado e não controlado conduzido por oito meses. Por meio da Gestão Integral da Farmacoterapia (GIF), utilizando a técnica Pharmacotherapy Workup (PW), avaliou-se as concentrações séricas dos lipíd ios, glicemia de jeju m, pressão arterial sistêmica e índice de massa corporal no início e ao final da GIF em sete pacientes. Também foi calculado o fator de risco para doenças cardiovasculares (Índice de Castelli). A GIF contribuiu para resolução de problemas relacionados à adesão medicamentosa e, principalmente, segurança pela redução dos valores de colesterol total. Não houve diferenças nos parâmetros clínicos avaliados e nem de problemas de segurança relacionados ao uso de quetiapina e risperidona. Palavras-chave: Atenção Farmacêutica. Dislipidemias. Efeitos Colaterais e Reações Adversas Relacionados a Medicamentos. Segurança do Paciente. Idoso. Risperidona. Fu marato de Quetiapina. __________________________________________________________________________________ Abstract: (Risperidone or Quetiapine in patients with Alzheimer's disease?) Although risperidone and quetiapine are not availab le in the SUS therapeutic clinical protocols for the treat ment of Behavioral and Psychological Symptoms of Dementia (BPSD), both are widely used for patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and its use is associated with physio and metabolic changes. It was proposed to evaluate the lipid profile o f patients with AD and BPSD using risperidone or quetiapine, assisted by the Centro de Referência do Idoso de Araraquara. It is a prospective, experimental, non-randomized, uncontrolled study conducted over eight months. Through the Integral Management of Pharmacotherapy (IMP), using Pharmacotherapy Workup (PW) technique, serum concentrations of lipids, fasting blood glucose, systemic arterial pressure and body mass index were evaluated at the beginning and end of IMP in seven patients. The cardiovascular disease risk was also calculated (Castelli Index). The GIF has contributed to solving drug adhesion problem and, most importantly, to lowering total cholesterol values. There was no difference between clinical criteria assessed and safety concerns related to the use of quetiapine and risperidone.

"Pharmaceuticals have increasingly been analysed as objects. This carves out a particular place for pharmaceuticals in the analysis of material things, and of material things in the analysis of pharmaceuticals. Whilst material culture analyses provide elements to theorise drugs as “things” it produces problems when these things are drugs. I argue that the consumable and changeable aspects of these “things” are left untheorised. This problem stems from a common assumption in anthropological analyses of material culture which tend to take the object for granted. That is to say, the process of object-making is often eclipsed by the object itself. Drawing on a new genre of pharmaceutical praxis in Brazil (the “manipulation pharmacy”) the paper explores the evanescent nature of pharmaceuticals. Manipulation – or compounding – pharmacies package pharmaceutical, herbal and cosmetic substances into “individualised” treatments, making explicit the evanescent nature of pharmaceutical objects. In the manipulation pharmacy, liquid, semi-solid and solid pharmaceutical substances are manufactured – or temporarily stabilised – into pharmaceutical “objects.” The possibility of effecting this hand-crafting is understood to define the effects that these pharmaceutical object can have, physiologically-speaking on their “patients”. Building on this case, it is argued that material culture analyses are useful only up to the point at which the “thing” is consumed or absorbed. They do not deal well with the metamorphosis or dissolution of the things they study. But what happens when dissolution or absorption is central to the material efficacy of the thing, as is the case with drugs?

Résumé

La dimension d’objet est souvent mise en avant dans l’analyse des médicaments. Ceci donne une place particulière aux médicaments dans l’analyse des objets de culture matérielle, et de la culture matérielle dans l’analyse des médicaments. Alors que les material culture studies offrent des éléments importants pour examiner la dimension d’objet des médicaments, cette approche soulève certains problèmes quand l’objet analysé est un produit pharmaceutique. Les aspects consommables et changeables de ces « choses » sont souvent peu ou pas théorisés. Cette difficulté provient de l’approche anthropologique de la culture matérielle qui tend à prendre l’état d’objet d’une chose comme acquise. Cela revient à dire que le processus de genèse d’un objet est souvent éclipsé par l’objet lui-même. En s’appuyant sur l’analyse d’un nouveau genre de pratique pharmaceutique au Brésil (la pharmacie de «manipulation»), l’article explore la nature évanescente des médicaments. Les pharmacies de manipulation conditionnent des substances pharmaceutiques, phytothérapiques et cosmétiques en traitements «individualisés», rendant ainsi explicite la dimension évanescente des objets pharmaceutiques. Dans la pharmacie de manipulation, des substances pharmaceutiques liquides, semi-solides et solides sont élaborées – ou temporairement stabilisées – en «objets»
pharmaceutiques. La possibilité de manufacturer de manière artisanale ces traitements est directement mise en relation par les acteurs de ce secteur avec les effets physiologiques que ces objets pharmaceutiques ont sur leurs « patients ». S’appuyant sur ce cas, l’article avance que les analyses de la culture matérielle sont utiles uniquement jusqu’au point où l’objet analysé est consommé ou absorbé. Ces approches analytiques ne rendent pas bien compte de la métamorphose ou de la dissolution des objets qu’elles examinent. Mais que se passe-t-il lorsque la dissolution ou l’absorption est primordiale pour l’efficacité matérielle d’une chose, telle que dans le cas des médicaments ?"

The paper aims to discuss some findings of an ongoing research on pharmaceuticals in the Regional state of Tgray of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. The paper focuses on the market of pharmaceuticals, local and imported. It
has to be viewed as a complex phenomenon, which includes the western, traditional and religious drugs. The three arenas
are not independent of one another. In fact, they are interrelated in a system, which is shaped by social forces and rooted  in history. The analysis must not elude these dimensions and the following questions will be addressed: what are, both at
private and public levels, the politics of distribution of western pharmaceuticals? How do the charity organizations and
NGO policies affect the distribution models? How do people use it in facing the major infectious diseases? How are western
pharmaceuticals perceived and used? What are the relationships among western, religious and traditional drugs? The paper will attempt to answer these questions.

Over the years, medical anthropology like the discipline of anthropology as whole has gone through a lots of changes. The present article discusses about one of these latest modifications, a paradigmatic shift which spared the anthropological lens to look into other more important and contemporary issues in complex and heterogeneous societies. It discusses the issue how pharmaceutical anthropology emerged as subfield. Moreover this article aims at providing some of the historical underpinnings which led to the development of pharmaceutical anthropology. Finally, by discussing about some of the contexts and scopes of pharmaceutical anthropology in India it shows how anthropologists can contribute to the better understanding of present day health care system.

DSM-5 contains a far more detailed exposition of the place of "culture" in psychopathology than any previous edition of the manual. At the same time, "culture" has also become the basis from which two of the major attacks on DSM-5 have been waged. The whole DSM project risks unravelling if "culture" is not addressed in substantially different terms. One crucial revision must be to recognize pharmaceutical uses as a part of "culture."

In 2006, the United States Department of Defense developed for the first time official criteria for the use of psychopharmaceuticals “in theater”—in the physical and tactical spaces of military operations including active combat. Based on fieldwork with Army soldiers and veterans, this article explores the transnational and global dimensions of military psychopharmaceutical use in the post-9/11 wars. I consider
the spatial, material, and symbolic dimensions of what I call “pharmaceutical creep”—the slow drift of psychopharmaceuticals from the civilian world into theater and into the military corporate body. While pharmaceutical creep is managed by the U.S. military as a problem of gatekeeping and of supply and provisioning, medications can appear as the solution to recruitment and performance problems once in theater. Drawing on soldiers’ accounts of medication use, I illuminate the possibilities, but also the frictions, that arise when routine psychopharmaceuticals are remade into technologies of global counterinsurgency. [global pharmaceuticals, psychiatric medications, psychiatry, U.S. military, U.S. empire]

This chapter explores that role that racial minority communities in the United States have played in advocating for race-based medicine. Specifically, it looks at African-Americans as central players in the making of BiDil, a heart failure drug approved by the FDA for only self-identified blacks. I suggest that while BiDil might be involved in the biologization of race, African American advocacy for the drug cannot be grasped as a return to racial science: race is not invoked in order to set up hierarchies of difference nor to legitimate the subordination of blacks. Rather, the contemporary appeal of race in medicine for African Americans is better understood in terms of biological citizenship. Generally speaking, biological citizenship refers to the linking of rights and citizenship to matters of health, disease, and bodily suffering. It thus includes any citizenship project in which ideas of citizenship are tied to beliefs about the corporeal, biological life of human beings. Such citizenship projects have become an important part of the political landscape in the West, with individuals and communities increasingly defining what it means to be a citizen in terms of their vital rights – their rights to life, health, and healing. African American support for BiDil is precisely about vital rights. It is about entitlement to health services, hope for better treatment, and helping suffering bodies. It is grounded in the belief that the African American community, which has historically been excluded from the benefits of biomedicine, deserves access to life saving medications. Pivotal here is thus not the biologization of race, but the idea that medications targeted to African Americans are essential to materializing the hope of finding cures and achieving healthy bodies.

This paper discusses re-emergence of Korean medicine(s) in the global context with a focus on a natural drug JOINS, a highly contentious drug regarding its legal status. By following through its life world, the paper contends that the drug is the embodiment of the postcolonial anxiety that crosses the intersections between the aspiring nation and globalizing strategies of the bio-pharmaceutical industry. JOINS is a natural drug prescribed to alleviate the symptoms of degenerative arthritis. SK Chemicals, Ltd., a giant domestic pharmaceutical company developed the drug by utilising the knowledge of traditional pharmacopeia and put it on the market in 2001. In the domestic market, the drug is treated as a prescription drug, implying that Western medicine-trained doctors (as opposed to Korean medicine doctors) are entitled to prescribe drugs. It also indicates that the drug has undergone a series of lab tests such
as toxicity, efficacy, and clinical trials in compliance with regulatory guidelines. However, the domestic standards are not rigorous enough to satisfy international standards, so that it is exported as a nutritional supplement abroad. The government, the pharmaceutical industry, and the Western medicine profession are happy with how the drug stands domestically and internationally. Rather, it is Korean doctors who try to disrupt the status quo and reclaim their rights to traditional knowledge, who have been alienated from the pharmaceuticalization of traditional knowledge. Thus, the JOINS tablet embodies the complex web of modern Korean society, professional interests, the pharmaceutical industry, and globalization.

This essay will discuss aspects of a ‘biographical approach’ to the anthropological study of pharmaceuticals. First, the biographical approach will be discussed in connection to
‘cultural biography of things’ (Kopytoff 2005). Second, I will go into detailed analysis of the life cycle of a drug (Van der Geest et al. 1996). Third, I will suggest further relevant
aspects to be included to the approach, such as the scrutiny of medicament line’s life and of bodies’ ‘medical’ biographies. Ethnographic examples will be provided by the works of
Ecks, Oldani, Biehl and Nguyen among others.

Mo d e r a ç ã o : C r i s t i a n a B a s t o s (I C S-U L i s b o a) C h i a C h i a r a P u s s e t t i (I C S-U L i s b o a) B i o t e c n o l o g i a s d e a p r i mo r a me n t o h u ma n o e n t r e b i o p o l í t i c a e b i o e c o n o mi a : p r á t i c a s d e a u t o c o n s t r u ç ã o n o p r o j e t o E X C E L Mi g u e l B a r b o s a (F M, I C S-U L i s b o a) C o n s u mo s e a t i t u d e s s o b r e me i o s d e a p r i mo r a me n t o h u ma n o n o c o n t e x t o a c a d é mi c o Mi g u e l Mi r a n d a (F M-U L i s b o a) , Mi g u e l B a r b o s a (F M, I C S-U L i s b o a) L i mi t l e s s s t u d y : D o p i n g C o g n i t i v o n o c o n t e x t o d a P r o v a N a c i o n a l d e S e r i a ç ã o Ma r i a Ma r i a C o n c e t t a l o B o s c o (I C S-U L i s b o a) D o s a r t e f a c t o s t e c n o l ó g i c o s e d o a p r i mo r a me n t o c o g n i t i v o : o f a z e r e d e s f a z e r d a c o n d i t i o h u ma n a

Qu’est ce qu’un corps ? Comment la guérison est elle pratiquée, reçue et évaluée ? Partant d’une analyse du parcours des hormones sexuelles – objets hybrides et complexes – dans les pratiques cliniques et les récits sur le corps, les travaux qui composent cette Habilitation ont ouvert une série de questions concernant le corps, ses délimitations, et la relation entre les techniques d’auto-perfectionnement, de contrôle ou d’hygiène et le projet de modernité Brésilien. Ils retracent un intérêt pour les médicaments comme objets matériels et discursifs mettant à jour l’imbrication des domaines pharmacologiques, corporels et politiques. Ancrés à la croisée de l’anthropologie sociale, l’anthropologie médicale et les Science and Technology Studies (STS), les travaux rassemblés ici ont abordé la question de la plasticité des corps et de leurs substances, les biopolitiques, les enjeux d’échelles et les politiques des (non)-savoirs, les régimes de preuve en santé publique, dans les champs de la santé sexuelle, nutritionnelle et santé mentale. Ils ont aboutit à des recherches en cours sur l’expansion frappante et les réinventions prolifiques de pratiques de guérison qui font usage d’un breuvage amazonien connu sous le nom d’ayahuasca, objet du Vol. 3. Celui-ci examine les frictions et échanges entre les formes néo-traditionnelles de guérison en contextes urbains, la réémergence des substances psychédéliques en psychiatrie et les reconfigurations contemporaines que cela induit pour les pratiques shamaniques en Amazonie. L’analyse comparative est structurée autour de trois objectifs qui sont de cartographier l’entrelacement des effets biologiques et symboliques de la guérison ; d’étudier les rencontres avec des êtres-plus-qu’humains dans les pratiques de guérison et d’analyser les conditions de possibilité de la coexistence d’ontologies multiples au sein d’un monde commun.

With the tenth anniversary of the landmark publication Social Lives of Medicines , new avenues arise for exploring the 'thinginess of things' . This paper, based on fieldwork carried out between 2001 and 2008, discusses how 'the Chinese antimalarial' as an over-thecounter medicine in petty enterprise clinics of East Africa became a biotechnological bulk item for Chinese import-export traders in a highly subsidised antimalarial health field after the WHO recommendations of 2005 and 2006. These observations are put in perspective with reflections on a practical engagement with the plant itself, i.e. Artemisia annua L. Rather than taking an 'ego-centred' and transactionalist viewpoint that follows the drug through a string of 'regimes of value' (Appadurai 1986), this paper underlines that a thing's thinginess is ontologically constitutive of its playing fields.

In Racial Prescriptions, Jonathan Xavier Inda offers a critical and timely analysis of the making of BiDil, the first (and only) drug that was marketed exclusively to African Americans. Sibille Merz speaks to him about the re-articulation of racial politics under neoliberalism, the legacies of scientific racism and the molecularization of biopolitics in the genomic age.

The degradation behavior of cefixime trihydrate was investigated under different stress conditions of acidic hydrolysis, alkaline hydrolysis and oxidation using spectrophotometry. Stability indicating spectrophotometric methods were developed that could separate the drug from its degradation products formed under these stress conditions. The UV spectral characteristics of the drug and degraded products were quite different and zero and first order derivative ultraviolet spectrophotometric methods were used to study the extent of degradation. Cefixime trihydrate was found to degrade extensively under experimental conditions. The methods were validated by establishing the linearity, inter and intraday precision, accuracy, selectivity and specificity.

Competing Orders of Medical care in Ethiopia. From Traditional Healers to Pharmaceutical Companies, Lexington Books, 2019.
Competing Orders of Medical Care in Ethiopia traces the development of pharmaceutical products and medical remedies in the health sector.
It analyzes the production and distribution of medications and examines how
local politics, financial resources, social relations, and neoliberal beliefs can make some treatments more widespread and accepted than others.

Over the years, medical anthropology like the discipline of anthropology as whole has gone through a lots of changes. The present article discusses about one of these latest modifications, a paradigmatic shift which spared the anthropological lens to look into other more important and contemporary issues in complex and heterogeneous societies. It discusses the issue how pharmaceutical anthropology emerged as subfield. Moreover this article aims at providing some of the historical underpinnings which led to the development of pharmaceutical anthropology. Finally, by discussing about some of the contexts and scopes of pharmaceutical anthropology in India it shows how anthropologists can contribute to the better understanding of present day health care system.

The last two decades have seen an exponential growth in the consumption and prescription of psychostimulants for the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) worldwide. While much has been said in the literature about the medicalization and globalization of ADHD, comparatively less is known about how these processes play out on the ground and outside English-speaking countries, where psychostimulants have become the first-line treatment for ADHD. By combining historical and clinical ethnographic research, this article charts the transnational histories and everyday lives of psychostimulants in Portugal at the nexus between what I term processes of medical globalization and social localization. It explores how international medical standards and pharmaceutical regulations converged with local prescribing trends and sociomaterial contingencies that placed this small Southern European country among the top 20 world consumers of methylphenidate. Following a methylphenidate shortage and the social explanations of clinicians, this exploration also shows how the dissemination of pharmaceutical sales and prescribing data by the media triggered a public–and increasingly politicized–debate on psychostimulant drug treatments. More broadly, this article illuminates how psychopharmaceuticals are circulated, contextualized, marketed, and modulated in their journey and it advances a relational and processual understanding of their shifting, multiscalar configurations.

This article draws on ethnographic research at iThemba Pharmaceuticals, a small South African startup pharmaceutical company with an elite international scientific board. The word ‘iThemba’ is Zulu for ‘hope’, and so far drug discovery at the company has been essentially aspirational rather than actual. Yet this particular place provides an entry point for exploring how the location of the scientific knowledge component of pharmaceuticals – rather than their production, licensing, or distribution – matters. The article explores why it matters for those interested in global health and postcolonial science, and why it matters for the scientists themselves. Consideration of this case illuminates limitations of global health frameworks that implicitly posit rich countries as the unique site of knowledge production, and thus as the source of unidirectional knowledge flows. It also provides a concrete example for consideration of the contexts and practices of postcolonial science, its constraints, and its promise. Although the world is not easily bifurcated, it still matters who makes knowledge and where.

After the Civil War and the defeat of Derg (1991), the new government in Ethiopia has started a program of liberalization of economy. This has involved the health system too, giving rise to new health enterprises both in clinical sector and in distribution and selling of pharmaceutical drugs. As a consequence, nowdays in Ethiopia in the pharmaceutical sector there public and private facilities co-exist.
The paper gives a sketch of organization of distribution of drugs in Tigray Region through the description of the policies of public wholesalers and private ones as well. It illustrates also the market of drugs analyzing the different kinds of drug sellers (private and public pharmacies, drug-shops and rural drug-shops), the charity sector, and the informal market of traditional medicine focusing in how people cope with this complex context in facing their health and care needs.

In north Indian psychiatry, clinical attentions to women's symptoms often involve scrutiny of emotions related to marriage and its breakdown. In pharmaceutically oriented practice, relations are used to evaluate biologies, and drugs produce the truth about relations at the same time that they produce the truth about bodies. In the process, clinical practice often involves unmaking relations, generating loss, in certain instances, as a dire result. In this, a particular kind of clinical knowing emerges, engaging broad cultural and historical connections between love and madness more than definitions of right and wrong unions. In asking how disciplinary and relational modes of biomedicine converge, I argue that in north Indian psychiatry's attentions to women, rather than enforcing normative configurations of ''the family,'' biomedicine grapples with the gendered fallout of kinship.

this book aims at placing research materials on Nzema local knowledge at the disposal of students of medical anthropology and traditional medicine. The materials set forth concern nosographical, ethnobotanic and pharmacological knowledge and practices which have been the object of longstanding research activities in tha Nzema area (Ghana, Western Region) by the members of Italian Ethnological Mission to Ghana

With the United States military stretched thin in the ''global war on terror,'' military officials have embraced psychopharmaceuticals in the effort to enable more troops to remain ''mission-capable.'' Within the intimate conditions in which deployed military personnel work and live, soldiers learn to read for signs of psychopharmaceutical use by others, and consequently, may become accountable to those on medication in new ways. On convoys and in the barracks, up in the observation post and out in the motor pool, the presence and perceived volatility of psychopharmaceuticals can enlist non-medical military personnel into the surveillance and monitoring of medicated peers, in sites far beyond the clinic. Drawing on fieldwork with Army personnel and veterans, this article explores collective and relational aspects of psychopharmaceutical use among soldiers deployed post-9/11 in Iraq and Afghanistan. I theorize this social landscape as a form of ''medication by proxy,'' both to play on the fluidity of the locus of medication administration and effects within the military corporate body, and to emphasize the material and spatial ways that proximity to psychopharmaceuticals pulls soldiers into relationships of care, concern and risk management. Cases presented here reveal a devolution and dispersal of biomedical psychiatric power that complicates mainstream narratives of mental health stigma in the US military.

This panel invites ethnographic accounts of the way il/licit drugs are made to do things in laboratories, therapeutic settings, drug outlets and everyday lives across regulatory settings in the Global North and South. It takes as point of departure that pharmaceutical objects do not produce universal biological effects as clinical researchers and drug regulators often assume, but that effects emerge in “a living labyrinth whose topology varies in time, where partial and circumstantial causalities are so intertwined that they often escape any a priori intelligibility” (Stengers 1996). How can we understand drug efficacy if, after Ingold, we conceptualize pharmaceuticals as “gatherings of materials in motion”? Conceptualizing pharmaceuticals as fluid rather than as bounded objects is productive because they are inherently evanescent and designed to be absorbed into bodies. The ways in which this process is locally understood and experienced is variable and influenced by marketing strategies that link desirable images and affects to drugs. While clinical trials and global regulatory mechanisms aim to stabilize the bounded contours of pharmaceutical things we suggest that this process is highly unstable. This is made evident when pharmaceuticals travel, and are used off­label for diverse non­approved indications as ethnographies of global pharmaceutical flows have eloquently shown. Such uses inspire their continuous reinvention. The changing moralities at work in local settings can either promote new uses for medicinal substances (such as marijuana as pain medication) or impede the use of others that have, rightly or wrongly, acquired negative popular representations (such as the use of prostagalins as abortifacients or LSD as treatment for addiction). Barry (2005), after Stengers, referred to this process of crafting new pharmaceutical properties or effects for drugs as making “informed material.” We invite case­studies of fluid drugs which examine the work of making drugs work across a range of scales: from informing chemical materials in trials to rendering drug effects locally meaningful in changing regulatory and experiential settings.

Abstract
The increase in use and distribution of pharmaceuticals on a global scale has caused pharmaceuticals to play an integral role in the notions of quality of health.
This study is concerned with how Western medication is transacted and interpreted in explicit and implicit contrast to the other context. I observe the commercial trade of medicines, specifically the effects of regulation of pharmaceutical drug trade in a suburb of Johannesburg (Yeoville) a low income area where many migrant groups have found long and short term refuge. A Policing and Mobility Project (Hornberger & Cossa 2010) centred on tracing paths of medication and the level of policing thereof in Johannesburg revealed that clandestine sale of medication occurs in the suburb’s local market. This prompted a comparison between the formal and informal pharmaceutical trade spaces.
Simon (a pharmacist) and Teresa (a former nurse turned market trader) sell pharmaceutical drugs in seemingly contrasting contexts. Despite their expertise in health care, Simon and Teresa were flung to opposite ends of the trade spectrum by regulation. In the weeks I spent with Teresa and Simon it became abundantly clear that the spaces which had been initially presented as the opposite of one another may have had a few layers of common ground. At first it seems as though only regulation has the ability to produce authority, trust and accountability. But later it becomes evident that such aspects can be reproduced through manipulation of everyday practices. Roger Cotterrell’s (1999) interpretation of Emile Durkheim’s view of the law as a ‘Social Fact’ (1999:9), demonstrates how the collective experience of regulation (an aspect of the law) affects the individual. But De Certeau (1984) claims that the same individual can tacitly undermine this collective experience (the dominant form) through everyday practices. The findings suggest that the assumed roles of regulated and unregulated pharmaceutical trading spaces are not as static as they appear. The study concluded that authority, trust and accountability can be reproduced outside of regulation. And secondly thus the formal and informal trade of pharmaceuticals in Yeoville have more in common than perceived since both Simon and Teresa, had authority in health, their customer’s trust and loyalty and were accountable within the trade.