Detective stories: The business of secrets of and the worlds of Indian pharma
‘Access to medicines’ is a phrase that has come to represent a way of addressing health inequalities by ensuring that safe, effective and affordable medicines are available to all. Calls for access to medicines often invoke a specter of so-called fake drugs to underscore urgency. This talk engages with ‘access to medicines’ from a new perspective - one that asks questions about how we might know what a “fake drug” is. While claims about low-quality pharma abound—particularly for Indian pharma—actual data about pharmaceutical quality is hard to find. Using fieldwork and historical records we explore the challenges that this evidentiary opacity presents for the researcher who wants to understand the work that claims to low-quality or fake pharma do.
Having stumbled onto the centrality of private investigators in managing pharmaceutical quality and pharmaceutical brand reputation, in this talk I present some very initial findings about who these private investigators are, how they do what they do, and what it all might mean for understanding the manufacturing of both claims to fakeness and getting to grips with the pharma quality question overall.
About the speaker
Sarah Hodges uses ethnography and historical records to ask: what are the everyday lives of public health measures?
To answer this question, she moves beyond medical anthropologists’ and historians’ conventional sites and objects of inquiry: the clinic, the lab, the classroom, or the regulator’s office. Instead, Sarah’s field sites include dumpsters behind hospitals, pharmaceutical distributors’ warehouse parking lots, radical newspaper archives, and hotel lobbies.
Sarah has honed her approach through a series of major projects:
- about the radical political life of women’s contraceptives in India under colonial rule
- on the economic afterlives of used, discarded medical plastics
- charting the political economies of Indian pharmaceuticals at home and abroad
In one way or another, all her research is empirically rooted in Tamil-speaking south India.
Before joining King’s in 2022 as Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, Sarah served on the faculties of Cambridge University (History and Philosophy of Science), SOAS (Departments of History and Anthropology), the University of Warwick (History), and was a visiting professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University (jointly hosted by the Centre for Social Medicine and Community Health and the Centre for Historical Studies). She holds an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago and a BA from Brown University.