Join or be excluded from biomedicine? JOINS and Post-colonial Korea

This paper discusses re-emergence of Korean medicine(s) in the global context with a focus on a natural drug JOINS, a highly contentious drug regarding its legal status. By following through its life world, the paper contends that the drug is the embodiment of the postcolonial anxiety that crosses the intersections between the aspiring nation and globalizing strategies of the bio-pharmaceutical industry. JOINS is a natural drug prescribed to alleviate the symptoms of degenerative arthritis. SK Chemicals, Ltd., a giant domestic pharmaceutical company developed the drug by utilizing the knowledge of traditional pharmacopeia and put it on the market in 2001. In the domestic market, the drug is treated as a prescription drug, implying that Western medicine-trained doctors (as opposed to Korean medicine doctors) are entitled to prescribe drugs. It also indicates that the drug has undergone a series of lab tests such as toxicity, efficacy, and clinical trials in compliance with regulatory guidelines. However, the domestic standards are not rigorous enough to satisfy international standards, so that it is exported as a nutritional supplement abroad. The government, the pharmaceutical industry, and the Western medicine profession are happy with how the drug stands domestically and internationally. Rather, it is Korean doctors who try to disrupt the status quo and reclaim their rights to traditional knowledge, who have been alienated from the pharmaceuticalization of traditional knowledge. Thus, the JOINS tablet embodies the complex web of modern Korean society, professional interests, the pharmaceutical industry, and globalization.