Main description:

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.

Contents:

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