PhD student Darren Blakeborough has just returned from presenting a paper at the Association for Cultural Studies (ACS) Crossroads conference in Istanbul, Turkey. His paper, entitled "Pharmaceutical Logic", explores some of the issues at the heart of the pharmaceutical industry.

Blakeborough's work contends that - due to a recent evolution from an industry in search of the "magic bullet" drug that would cure all of humanity's ills into a global corporate, medical, and political juggernaut - pharmaceutical companies are now defined by marketing of both drug and disease.

This shift in recent years has resulted in a much larger social discourse and created a "pharmaceutical logic" that frames a pharmaceutical intervention as the primary response to any problem - real, perceived or otherwise. The evolving pharmaceutical discourse has progressed in recent years from innovation into a concentrated focus on marketing and consumer sales.
By broadening definitions of what is sickness and offering drugs as a normative cure, pharmaceutical companies are able to increase their potential customer base and, in turn, their profits.

The paper is part a larger research project, which looks at Direct-to-Consumer Advertising (DTCA) of pharmaceuticals in Canada from multiple perspectives including policy, representions, and cross-cultural while framing it all in a larger social gerontological perspective.

As part of the increasingly global reach of the project, Darren has agreed to work with the School of Government, Health Services Research Centre at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. The research will be a comparative study of Canada's and New Zealand's policies on DTCA while investigating some of the rationales behind the disparities.