Paper short abstract:

Drastic austerity-driven pharmaceutical reforms triggered ongoing pharmaceutical shortages in Greece. This paper investigates the commitments, both ethical and economic, which undergird the emergence of pharmaceutical commons and trade between different neighborhood pharmacies.

Paper long abstract:

When Greece implemented austerity at the behest of international creditors in 2010, the state was chided for its clientelistic character, and the directive was clear: paying back its loans would depend on purging political and economic exchanges of the murky potential for corruption introduced by personal relations. Greece’s pharmaceutical spending was slashed, which triggered ongoing pharmaceutical shortages, and liberalizing reforms, which the 2010 Economic Adjustment Programme insisted would “enhance competition in open markets.” Enacted in the name of competition, these reforms misfired, deepening the kind of personal relations they sought to obliterate and seeding new mutual ties. Informal networks of pharmaceutical exchange took shape across the city, with pharmacists trading scarce pharmaceuticals in order to each satisfy the needs of their long-term clients, a practice that has continued as COVID challenged supply chains. This paper understands such networks as a “commoning project” (Varvarousis & Kallis, 2017) whereby cooperative pharmaceutical sharing not only bolster the resilience of each pharmacy in the context of precarious supply chains, but also create relationships of interdependence and support between different pharmacies and their pharmacists where before, there was often only familiarity. Interviews with neighborhood pharmacists in Athens and Karditsa, Greece, suggest that although Greece boasts a particularly dense pharmacy economy, the crisis did not deepen competitive relations. Rather, these networks of mutual pharmaceutical exchange suggest a new commons emerged out of a shared commitment, both ethical and economic, to fostering the neighborhood intimacies and the ethos of accommodation that undergird the business of neighborhood pharmacies.