• The Spectacular Generic: Pharmaceuticals and the Simipolitical in Mexico
• Duke University Press, January 2023
• By Cori Hayden, professor of medical and sociocultural anthropology, UC Berkeley
• WHAT: Book talk sponsored by the UC Davis Hemispheric Institute on the Americas
• WHEN: Noon-2 p.m. Friday, March 3
• WHERE: 3201 Hart Hall (Risling Room)
• OTHER INFORMATION: Free and open to the public. Lunch offered for participants.

From the publisher: “Cori Hayden examines how generic drugs have transformed public health politics and everyday experiences of pharmaceutical consumption in Latin America.” Focusing on the Mexican pharmacy chain Farmacias Similares and its proprietor, Víctor González Torres, aka Dr. Simi, Hayden shows how generics have become potent commodities in a post-patent world. In Mexico, Dr. Simi has not simply competed with the transnationals in selling cheaper copies of leading-brand drugs; his enterprise has also come to compete with the Mexican state, reorganizing the provision of medicine and basic health care for millions of people. Hayden juxtaposes this story with Dr. Simi’s less successful efforts in Argentina, where he confronted a radically different configuration of pharmaceutical politics.

Cori Hayden has opened up a unique field of inquiry into the multiplicity of generic medicines through which she powerfully interrogates transforming configurations of statecraft, medical capitalism and patient-citizenry. — João Biehl, author of “Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival”

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