Pharmatechnologies and the ills of medical progress

The analogy between the military-industrial complex and its medical counterpart serves as a useful framework for investigating the dark side of pharmatechnologies, which are smilarly tied into the harm-creating alliances, self-serving policies and criminal activities identified within the state-defence industry paradigm (Naylor 2004; Hughes 2007; Whyte 2007; Godfrey et al. 2014). As the former US President, Dwight Eisenhower (attributed with coining the term 'military-industrial complex') warned: 'we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist' (Congressional Record" Senate 1966). This chapter will argue that this perspicacious caution also resonates loudly in the pharmaceuticalized context of health and disease prevention. While the political economy of military technologies provokes unease with its potential for corruption, human rights abuses and other myriad harms, pharmatechnologies largely remain under the radar of criminological scrutiny. In a recent update to his 1984 publication on corporate crime and the pharmaceutical industry, John Braithwaite opined the dearth of criminological interest: 'So many criminologists study individual homicide, while so few have chosen to view the topic of this book as meriting their attention' (Dukes et al. 2014: 282). Jeffrey Reiman and Joe Sim have likewise identifted a range of medical harms through the lens of criminology and deviancy studies (Reiman 2004; Sim 1990) and yet despite the growing number of abuses in this area scholarship, other than from bioethicists and even medical practitioners, remains scare. The statistics make startling reading. An estimated 197,000 people in the EU die every year from adverse reactions to pharmaceutical drugs, in what has been described as an 'epidemic' of drug failures and adverse reactions (Archibald, Coleman and Foster 2011). Deaths from counterfeit drugs alone in a single year account for 'more than all the people killed across the globe by homicide, terrorism and warfare combined for any year of this century so far' (Dukes et al. 2014: 281). Clinical trials too have resulted in numerous tragic outcomes, severe, chronic and fatal, especially in the developing world as the current favoured site for human experimentation (Rawlinson and Yadavendu 2015; Petryna 2009).