Pharmaceutical Circulation Through Difference in Athens, Greece

• In Event: Domains of Critical Drug Studies: Absent Pleasures and Risky Presents in Emerging Spaces of Harm Reduction - III

Abstract

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork with chronically-ill pharmaceutical seekers in Athens, Greece who compose networks of pharmaceutical circulation amidst an unstable medical economy. As austerity measures reduced pharmaceutical insurance subsidies, many chronically-ill people lost access to the pharmaceuticals on which they depended. Grassroots solidarity pharmacies, which redistribute pharmaceuticals donated by the public to those who cannot otherwise afford them, proliferated across Greece. While the basis of solidarity pharmacy inventory initially flowed from the general public’s overstocked medicine cabinets, they have since been exhausted over years of economic instability. Now, the therapeutic precarity of chronically ill people drives the increasingly scarce solidarity inventory; small amounts of already-purchased pharmaceuticals are donated upon the death or therapeutic shifts of chronically-ill others who had been able to afford their medications.
Solidarity-based pharmaceutical circulation requires dependencies across difference between users. Dependencies between those who initially purchased pharmaceuticals and those who ultimately use them require differential access to health resources and differential relations to the pharmaceutical. They also require that both groups of chronically-ill pharmaceutical users or their families be drawn to participate in solidarity pharmacies. This paper heeds disability scholarship by avoiding a reduction of chronic illness to shared medico-biological categories, instead considering the assemblage of social positionings that contextualize both, the differences between solidarity pharmaceutical seekers and donators, and that which holds them together and compels them to participate in solidarity circulation. What social and therapeutic possibilities do pharmaceutical seekers open up, and what do they foreclose, through harnessing difference and interruption?

Author

• Taylor Bell, University of California, Davis