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.