The same and not the same: Generic medicines and the pharma-politics of similarity

Cori Hayden, UC-Berkeley

Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology

From Mexico's ubiquitous pharmacy chain Farmacias Similares to the rise of debates over biosimilar drugs in Europe and the U.S., the notion of the similar has come to occupy an important place in debates over ensuring access to affordable pharmaceuticals, north and south. In Mexico, debates over Farmacias Similares, their charismatic cartoon mascot (Dr. Simi), and their slogan (“the same, but cheaper”) have unleashed complex commercial, political, and regulatory contests over what shall count as adequate forms of same-ness, equivalence, and similarity. Yet such complex iterations of the “proper copy” are not solely the outcome of struggles over drug access. The second part of this paper places these questions in the context of a long and continuing history of what we might call simi-semiotics in pharmacology and chemistry more broadly. As chemist Roald Hoffman writes in his popular book, The Same and Not the Same, chemistry’s core technical and philosophical question revolves precisely around the tension between sameness (or identity) and difference – and the tricky matter of how one tells them apart. Indeed, as the philosophical attention to chemistry in STS has shown, these matters are central to the philosophy and rhetoric of chemistry more broadly, and to drug discovery and testing in particular. This paper thus looks to pharmaceuticals to think simultaneously about chemically-configured notions of similarity and difference, and their implication in and for politics “at large.”