Paper Short Abstract:

Exploring the ambivalence of pharmaceuticals in governing life and death, this paper traces the global movements of sodium pentobarbital. It reassembles its socio-cultural biography, exploring its role in shaping life-death worlds across socio-economic, racial, and ethnic lines.

Paper Abstract:

Against the background of pharmaceuticals as ambivalent technologies engaged in the production of life-death worlds, shaping different forms of governance of life and death, and upholding and co-producing global inequalities of lives, this paper traces the global movements of sodium pentobarbital (SP) and its local usage in bio- and necropolitical practices. SP, first synthesised in the 1930s, transitioned from a popular sedative to a drug central to death-inducing practices. These practices, linked by their common use of SP, represent unique intersections of medical, legal, and political technologies that unevenly distribute life and death across diverse geographies, groups, and people. The disparities in how SP is used across these contexts underscore the complexities of its global circulation and highlights the implications of the use of pharmaceuticals by state institutions and private organisations to produce or facilitate death. Based on ongoing research that combines different qualitative methodologies to follow the global flows and local applications of SP across time and space, this paper reassembles its socio-cultural biography to understand SP’s role in co-producing life-death worlds as spaces of sociality where life and death are negotiated across intersectional lines of socio-economic status, race, and ethnicity.