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Contribution short abstract

Sodium pentobarbital (SP) shifts between commoning and uncommoning: once a sedative, now central in assisted dying and executions. This talk explores SP’s dual role as healer and killer, tracing its governance across markets and laws, and revealing its entanglement in life-death worlds.

Contribution long abstract

Originally synthesised in the 1930s as a common sedative and sleeping aid, sodium pentobarbital (SP) gained popularity as a widely used barbiturate but soon became associated with numerous accidental overdoses and suicides. As awareness of its dangers grew, SP was largely replaced by benzodiazepines, which carried a lower risk of overdose and addiction. However, SP’s uncommoning as a therapeutic drug coincided with its re-commoning in highly specific contexts, particularly as the preferred drug for inducing death in assisted dying procedures in Switzerland and for administering lethal injections in the United States. This paradoxical trajectory from therapeutic drug to a substance primarily valued for its lethality reveals the complex governance of psychoactive substances across shifting socio-cultural, political, and economic landscapes. This presentation explores SP’s life-death worlds through the lens of commoning and uncommoning, offering two critical insights into its global circulation and local applications. First, SP’s dual role as a pharmakon—both a healer and a killer—underscores its ambivalent status as a common good in medical settings while also becoming uncommon in broader pharmaceutical markets. Second, the tension between SP’s commodification and criminalisation highlights how market dynamics, legal frameworks, and public health discourses reshape its accessibility and use. By ethnographically tracing SP’s shifting trajectories, this paper reflects on how psychoactive drugs become common or uncommon in specific settings and historical moments, as well as their broader entanglements with life-death governance.

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Contribution short abstract

Introducing some trends in the anthropology of drugs and drug use that might be of importance to this panel

Contribution long abstract

I refer to a recent debate in the Norwegian public sphere about the merits of psychedelic science to make a intervention about commoning and uncommoning in the anthropology of drugs.

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Contribution short abstract

This paper traces the processes and politics around Daridorexant, the first insomnia medication that can be prescribed long-term in Germany. I discuss how attempts to common Daridorexant rely on emphasizing the ‘commonness’ of insomnia and on ‘uncommoning’ the idea that sleeping pills are dangerous.

Contribution long abstract

Daridorexant was launched on the German pharmaceutical market in 2022. It is the first drug in Germany that has been approved for long-term insomnia treatment, i.e. it can be prescribed for more than four weeks (which is the limit for other insomnia medications, notably benzodiazepines and Z-drugs, that are known to be addictive). Promotors of the drug, and the related change of policy, have celebrated it as a ‘game changer’ while critics are skeptical both of Darideroxant’s actual efficacy and of what the shift in policy may imply for how insomnia is understood and treated.

Based on ethnographic observations at sleep medicine conferences, my paper traces the politics and contestations around drug-based therapy for insomnia in Germany. I discuss how attempts to ‘common’ Daridorexant rely on emphasizing 1) the high prevalence of insomnia; 2) a massive treatment gap and 3) on ‘uncommoning’ the idea that sleeping pills are dangerous. The latter, in particular, also depends on shifting common ‘psychological’ understandings of insomnia to more biological ones. Supporters of Daridorexant mobilize ideas of patient well-being, clinical expertise and evidence to render the drug acceptable. These marketing strategies are often convincing, even though it is well-known that trials and experts have been commissioned by the pharmaceutical producer. My paper shows how the (un)commoning of drugs happens through the skillful manipulation of complex legal, clinical, economic and moral rationalities which makes it hard even for critical researchers to disentangle economic interests from patient well-being, evidence from advertisement, and good drugs from bad ones.

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Contribution short abstract

Here I explore the connectedness between distinct bioprospecting projects for the development of new immunotherapies and their therapeutic and regulatory experiences in Brazil and Europe. I focus on aspects of the mobility, re-hierarchization and use of liminal substances that were once ostracized.

Contribution long abstract

While the standard use of palliative immunosuppressants to treat diverse immunopathologies has been questioned by multiple actors over decades not only at centres of knowledge production in Western countries but also in the Global South, substances that were previously tabooed seem now to reappear as potential therapeutic agents. That seems to be the case for those such as deltorphine, melittin, beta-glucana, and cannabinoids, among others, which are undergoing processes of gradual rehabilitation conducted by experimental biomedical actors, occasionally together with non-biomedical experts. If so, how is this taking place and what would that mean?

In this paper, I report on my anthropological comparative investigation of distinct bioprospecting projects for the development of new immunotherapies and their therapeutic and regulatory experiences in Brazil and Europe. My aim is to analyse from a transnational, historical and relational perspective aspects of the mobility, re-hierarchization and use of substances with potential antigenic power that were once forbidden and/or stigmatized; particularly in the context of disputes between immunosuppression and immunostimulation as competing therapeutic models, and of related commercial, moral and legal frictions. For that, I use research materials co-produced through longitudinal fieldwork to discuss evidence-making practices.

One of my points of reflection consists in paying attention to the connectedness of promissory liminal substances to medical colloidal perspectives that co-shaped the development of so-called biotherapies in the interwar period. With it, I seek to unveil oft-unseen connections between multiple substances that are mostly addressed independently from each other, such as their common properties as unspecific immunostimulants.