Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health

"Drugs for Life is simply superb, a major accomplishment in the study of pharmaceuticals and their expanding relation to life itself. There is no recent scholarly work that attempts or accomplishes what Joseph Dumit does here, tackling the relation between big pharma and clinical epistemology in such a comprehensive and satisfying way. He deftly links critical debates across the life and human sciences, making an important and compelling argument on a matter central to contemporary public debate." Lawrence Cohen, author of No Aging in India: Alzheimer's, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things "Drugs for Life shocks the reader into seeing health, medicine, pharmaceuticals, and the pharmaceutical industry and drug research for what they are from a cultural standpoint: a new framing of the future world for all of us. And that future is now and troubling and transformative of human conditions. A remarkable contribution that will perturb and disturb professional and general readers." Arthur Kleinman, co-editor of Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practices "In this provocative and important book, Joseph Dumit brings a new approach to bear on critiques of the pharmaceutical industry and U.S. health care. He marshals ethnographic research among drug company executives and marketing strategists, along with the analysis of scientific and popular representations of their products, showing how consumers have been tutored into a proactive stance toward health. Over the past few decades, we have come to live by 'the numbers' and 'risk factors' that make embracing lifelong pharmaceutical regimes seem like common sense. But is it? Dumit explores the pharmaceuticalization of American culture and consciousness with a light, accessible touch that belies the depth of his knowledge." Rayna Rapp, author of Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America