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The Racialization of Drug Fakery and Pharmaceutical Markets

ABSTRACT In this article, I show that fake drugs circulate widely in markets that chronically experience non-equilibrium. Moreover, those who manufacture, buy, and sell low priced drugs for African markets are negotiating chronic market volatility and downward pricing pressures that are transnational in scope. I argue that global policy experts; state, regional, and global regulation agencies and organizations; and international NGOs that have stakes in eradicating fake drugs falsely assume that pharmaceutical traders work within market equilibrium conditions. These assumptions are racialized because they hold actors and markets accountable to a market equilibrium and rational actor standard that are characterized by a European imagination that came into being at the height of trans-Atlantic slavery and capitalist formation. Yorùbá and Ìgbò non-equilibrium theories of the market, in contrast, have characterized markets as volatile and precarious since the 15th century arrival of the Portuguese to West Africa. The implications are that preconceived ideas of equilibrium de facto racialize those who have little opportunity in a deeply precarious system – they are labeled as “fraudsters” rather than seen as rational actors working under conditions of extreme market volatility.