Pharmocracy

Kaushik Sunder Rajan

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.

Acknowledgments  xi Introduction. Value, Politics, and Knowledge in the Pharmocracy  1 1. Speculative Values: Pharmaceutical Crisis and Financialized Capital  37 2. Bioethical Values: HPV Vaccines, Public Scandal, and Experimental Subjectivity  62 3. Constitutional Values: The Trials of Gleevec and Judicialized Politics  112 4. Philanthropic Values: Corporate Social Responsibility and Monopoly in the Pharmocracy  157 5. Postcolonial Values: National Industries in Pharmaceutical Empire  193 Conclusion. Constitutions of Health, Responsibility, and Democracy  229 Notes  247 References  301 Index  321