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Pharmaceutical Meaning-Making beyond Marketing: Racialized Subjects of Generic Thiazide

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Anne Pollock
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Extract

If we want to understand the allure of pharmaceuticals, we need to look beyond both medical efficacy and profit motives. The success (or failure) of a drug depends not only on these, but also on how it mobilizes prior conceptions of identity. The extent to which a drug is taken — or talked about — is related to commodity properties that exceed the physiological and the economic. In implicit contrast to the discussions of BiDil elsewhere in this collection, I explore how the links between race and pharmaceuticals can be both unstable and generative even when the drug in question is old and generic. By attending closely to an encounter around generic thiazide outside of a medical or marketing context, I show that although pharmaceuticals can seem to rely on scientific data and marketing for their power, they are, in fact, also subject to claims on many more registers that cannot quite subsume or refute each other.

Type
Symposium
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , Fall 2008 , pp. 530 - 536
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2008

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References

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