Drugs and Pharmaceuticals

Among the most rapidly advancing global technologies, pharmaceuticals are at the center of global struggles for human rights, health, trade, and human connectivity. Drugs and pharmaceuticals are important in two significant ways for global studies: (1) The development, production, and regulation of legal drugs and pharmaceuticals are producing new global forms of quality assurance and protection for intellectual property, and (2) drugs and pharmaceuticals have been the catalyst for the mobilization of a transnational social movement around issues of global access.

Globalization processes have been linked to increasing epidemics of diet or lifestyle diseases (e.g., diabetes, heart disease, lung disease, and asthma) in rich countries and infectious diseases (e.g., HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, often referred to simply as “the three diseases” as a statement of their impact on global health) in poor countries. The causal links between global processes and disease vectors are complex and not unidirectional (proving that the links between globalization and disease remain more ideological than empirical). Still, given the progress in drug development, nutrition, and hygiene, levels of morbidity (sickness) and mortality remain much higher than expected. Understanding why this is the case is important for understanding global processes.

Spending on pharmaceuticals alone accounts for more than 15% of measured total global spending on health. The development of new drugs, including testing in clinical trials, and distribution of existing ones are genuinely global in scope. Struggles over access to good quality drugs have mobilized political action in countries as diverse as Brazil, South Africa, and the United States. Yet, most significantly for global studies, these movements have not drawn support primarily from national citizens but from transnational linkages between citizens who communicate and act using new media and global communications.

Understanding the economics and politics of how pharmaceuticals is linked to how drugs, or the lack of them, influence people's everyday lives. João Biehl's work on Brazil documents how what he calls the “pharmaceuticalization” of governance and citizenship creates new forms of [Page 430]inequality between those who have access to drugs and those who do not. In the process, this pharmaceuticalization highlights the deficiencies in the national health care structures as well as the poverty and inequality among citizens. Today, drugs and pharmaceuticals are technologies with implications for individual health and for social, economic, and political well-being.