Continuing his pioneering theoretical explorations into the relationships among biosciences, the market, and political economy, Kaushik Sunder Rajan introduces the concept of pharmocracy to explain the structure and operation of the global hegemony of the multinational pharmaceutical industry. He reveals pharmocracy's logic in two case studies from contemporary India: the controversial introduction of an HPV vaccine in 2010, and the Indian Patent Office's denial of a patent for an anticancer drug in 2006 and ensuing legal battles. In each instance health was appropriated by capital and transformed from an embodied state of well-being into an abstract category made subject to capital's interests. These cases demonstrate the precarious situation in which pharmocracy places democracy, as India's accommodation of global pharmaceutical regulatory frameworks pits the interests of its citizens against those of international capital. Sunder Rajan's insights into this dynamic make clear the high stakes of pharmocracy's intersection with health, politics, and democracy.
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Value, Politics, and Knowledge in the Pharmocracy
- Representations of Health
- Pharmocracy
- Elements of Pharmocracy (1): A Tale of Two Trials
- Elements of Pharmocracy (2): Theorizing Value, Politics, and Knowledge
- Situating Pharmocracy
- Chapter One: Speculative Values: Pharmaceutical Crisis and Financialized Capital
- Dialectics of an Industry
- Ramifications of the Structure of Pharmaceutical Crisis
- Consumer Markets and Global Drug Pricing
- Speculative Trajectories of Pharmaceutical Development
- Postscript: Pharma Co. Logic
- Chapter Two: Bioethical Values: HPV Vaccines, Public Scandal, and Experimental Subjectivity
- From Promise to Scandal
- HPV Vaccine Studies
- Ethics
- Causality
- Technocracy
- The Science and Politics of the HPV Vaccine Studies
- Consequences and Trajectories
- Knowledge/Value and Experimental Subjectivity
- Postscript: Pharmapublics
- Chapter Three: Constitutional Values: The Trials of Gleevec and Judicialized Politics
- Two Histories of Gleevec
- Gleevec Patent Denial and the Madras High Court Case, 2005–2007
- The Supreme Court Case, 2009–2013
- The Science and Politics of Gleevec
- Dialogues and Antinomies of the State
- Judicial Ethics and the Spirit of Constitutionalism
- Postscript: Pharmaco(law)gic
- Chapter Four: Philanthropic Values: Corporate Social Responsibility and Monopoly in the Pharmocracy
- Monopolyand GIPAP
- The Gleevec EMR Controversy
- Perspectives on GIPAP in Practice
- Controversies and Political Stakes
- Postscript: Pharmassist
- Chapter Five: Postcolonial Values: Nationalist Industries in Pharmaceutical Empire
- First Conjuncture: Cipla Goes Global
- Second Conjuncture: Cipla Opposes TRIPS
- The State and Global Geopolitics
- Third Conjuncture: From Cipla’s High Noon to Its Vanishing Present
- Fourth Conjuncture: India Signs on to TRIPS
- Free Trade and Pharmaceutical Imperialism
- Postscript: Pharma’s Markets
- Conclusion: Constitutions of Health, Responsibility, and Democracy
- Three Moments of Rescripting
- Terrains of Pharmaceutical Politics
- Democracy and Responsibility
- Seizing the State
- A Final Postscript about Health
- Notes
- References
- Index
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