Markets and Molecules: A Pharmaceutical Primer from the South

The Indian pharmaceutical industry has historically manufactured low-cost drugs for the global poor. Activist mobilizations at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic revealed a vast cost gap between global brands and Indian generics, much to the embarrassment of Euro-American corporations that were in the habit of pricing drugs for only the wealthy or well insured. As new drug access controversies focus on anticancer therapies, they reveal new flows of international capital, emergent genetic technologies, and increasingly coercive trade regimes. Together these favor multinational corporate oligopolies, which imperil the legacy of HIV/AIDS activism and the future availability of essential life-saving drugs for the work of global public health. In this essay, I describe how the future of the right to drug access rests uneasily, and potentially calamitously, on a shifting balance of power between global south interests and Euro-American pharmaceutical capital.