Introduction

Most of the time, phrases such as the ‘drugs trade’, ‘drug addiction’ and ‘drug dealers’ have a certain connotation relating to the harms (and crimes) associated with ‘drugs’. For the most part, the images, representations and associations conjured up by these will not involve companies such as Pfizer, Roche or Bristol- Myers Squibb, nor products such as Oxycontin or Thalidomide. This chapter will consider how drugs available on prescription or over the counter, that is, the legal products of the pharmaceutical industry, are not necessarily less – and can be more – harmful than those drugs prohibited by law over which ‘wars’ are waged by states (as you read in Chapter 2). If this is the case, then it is at least plausible to think of those who develop, make and sell these legal drugs – the pharmaceutical industry – as drug dealers, in the literal and also the pejorative sense of this term.

This chapter focuses on the nature, structure and, in particular, harms produced by the global pharmaceutical industry – an industry of such scale and reach that it is often colloquially referred to as ‘Big Pharma’. While reading the chapter, you will be thinking about a specific class of drugs: ‘substances that we identify as pharmaceuticals [which] are simply those substances that we use as human (or animal) medicines’ (Taylor, 2016: 5).

This book has explored how some drug harms come to be constructed as crimes and how other harms come to be deconstructed, neutralized and rendered invisible or even desirable by powerful interests. This chapter shifts the focus even further away from harms that are criminalized and examines.