Dear All,
Thinking about the role of the pharmaceutical industry in producing the opioid misuse visible in different parts of the world, as a point of conversation I wondered whether we might broaden this out to think of it as just one part of commercialised healthcare systems more broadly.
Pharmaceutical companies try to derive as much profit as possible from the sale of lucrative and habit-forming pharmaceuticals (Purdue and Oxycontin being the most prominent example), but this often aligns with the motivations of corporate hospitals, pharmacies, and so forth. I was interested to read some news reporting a few years that suggested that US-based pharma companies were ready to provide opioid drugs to "new markets" such as India (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/27/india-opioids-crisis-us-pa...). Reading this piece, I was struck by the fact that what it discusses is not the process of making morphine available (very cheap and out of patent) but the examples instead are buprenorphine and fentanyl patches, in this case made by Johnson and Johnson, supplied to private pain clinics, and sold at a high price ($10/patch). While there can of course be very good reasons for using more expensive and modern opioid drugs in such a scenario, its is also true that these drugs make more money not just for the pharma companies, but also for the hospitals, clinics, pharmacies etc. Pharma companies are obviously major players here, but they operate in systems of actors that can function in similar ways. I'd be curious to hear what others made of this, whether pharma companies are distinct (acting also as lobbyists, powerful stakeholders etc.)
All the best,
Nick
HIFA profile: Nick Surawy Stepney is a Wellcome Trust research fellow at the University of Exeter. A medical anthropologist, his current research project 'Drug Addiction and De-addiction in India: Genealogies, Politics and Practices' utilises ethnographic and archival methods to examine how ‘addiction’ is imagined and intervened upon in medical settings in north India. He completed his PhD in anthropology at the department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London in September 2022, with a project analysing the material and symbolic circulations of morphine in Indian cancer care. Subsequent to this, he was a postdoctoral research associate at King's, on the project ‘Grid oncology: remaking cancer care in India’. N.Surawy-Stepney AT exeter.ac.uk