Anti-counterfeiting laws, access to drugs and transnational activism in India and Kenya
Mathieu Quet (EHESS) and Marine al-Dahdah3rd February 2012
Abstract
This talk will cover the recent controversies raised by the issue of «counterfeit medicines» at a global level – involving the European Union, India and East African countries such as Kenya. Since the early 2000s, international institutions such as the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization have shown increasing concern over the presence of "counterfeit drugs" in emerging and developing countries. The notion of "counterfeiting" points to a serious public health issue for Southern countries: the proliferation of spurious, expired, unsafe drugs. However, the notion of «counterfeit» raises several critiques from civil society, as it is seen to be used by Northern countries and companies to reinforce their intellectual property strategies and to restrain the production and circulation of generic drugs. The controversies provoked by anti-counterfeiting policies therefore offer an occasion to enrich our understanding of the mechanisms of power at stake in the global regulation of drugs' circulation. They illuminate the entanglement of commercial strategies, market regulations and safety policies in a transnational context. The analysis will mix «science and technology studies» (STS) and discourse analysis. It will focus on how the «anticounterfeit policy» leads to a specific discourse which blurs the differences between generic and unsafe drugs, and explains its impact on policies on the accessibility of drugs.
