Global Health and Pharmacology

Across the many issues pertaining to pharmaceuticals worldwide, ‘access’ is a common denominator and a critical facet of what makes pharmaceuticals life changing, heartbreaking, deeply problematic, dangerous, complex, and successful. As such, in this issue, we seek to critically appraise what constitutes access in the arena of global pharmaceuticals. Over the last few decades, for example, human rights campaigns have pushed for access globally to affordable antiretrovirals and for the development of drugs for neglected diseases. Both of these in different ways made visible the increasingly key role of pharmaceuticals in defining our lives; the difficulties of achieving equitable geo-political governance of pharmaceutical development and distribution; and the differential valuation of human lives made evident by the presence or absence of essential medicines and vaccines. While access usually is invoked as a positive, however, it also carries its own risks. Access to too many pharmaceuticals because of pharmaceutical industry efforts to significantly expand markets for old and new pharmaceuticals is the example most often noted in the media and scholarship. But other kinds of problematic access also need further interrogation, such as access to the wrong kinds of pharmaceuticals including counterfeit, contaminated, or substandard; or the predominance of biomedical over so-called alternative medicines. All of these and other facets of access can wreak serious havoc with public and personal health, economies and ecologies, productions of knowledge, and regulatory systems.

In this issue we want to further explore the many and varied facets of pharmaceutical access given the critical role it plays in galvanizing our attention to areas that are working well and many that are deeply problematic in pharmaceutical development, testing, regulation, distribution, and consumption. We hope to attract scholarship on facets of access that are new and underexplored, as well as scholarship that revisits issues, such as access to ARVs, that have largely faded from our collective attention even while still all too trenchant in many parts of the world. Within the theme of global health and pharmacology we encourage both empirical studies focused on particular regions, as well as more theoretical and conceptual treatments of past, present, or future interventions in the relationship between pharmaceuticals and global health. We hope to get articles covering the spectrum of pharmacology and indigenous systems of therapeutic knowledge including the sourcing and supply of ingredients, the various means through which therapeutics are produced and distributed, and the many practices around consumption. Across these categories, we are interested in the ways in which the political economy of the health care system – whether market-driven, socialized, or charitable – structures access to pharmaceuticals, while attending as well to other barriers to access and the strategies people use to overcome or circumnavigate them.

We encourage an array of disciplinary perspectives from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, as well as multi- or transdisciplinary scholarship. Our goal with this volume is to trouble the very concept of access, raising critical questions about the processes through which access assumes meaning, is circumscribed, contested, and politicized; for whom, under what conditions, and for what purpose. In doing so, we hope to offer insights into past and current global health interventions while also raising possibilities for future policy changes in the ongoing crises of pharmaceutical access.

Authors submitting via Frontiers in Pharmacology should be in touch with the Topic Editors prior to submission.