Pharmacovigilance: a biopolitical strategy

Abstract

This essay intends to problematize the role of pharmacovigilance as a strategy for governing human life. In the introduction we present the hypothesis that leads our reflections: that it was in the wake of tragedies involving drugs that disciplines were developed and the knowledge that sustain the government of life in a State that adopts health as a duty and medicine as one of its most valuable resources was formed. In the presented article, in the light of the works of the philosopher Michel Foucault, an attempt is made to think of pharmacovigilance as a gear technology between medicine, body, and power. In the first part, we discuss the panopticism inaugurated by Jeremy Bentham in the eighteenth century, in an attempt to signal that the inspection on the use and effects of drugs initiated in the nineteenth century found its support in the architectural model he developed. In the second part, we present pharmacovigilance as an unfolding of a modality of life politics investigated by Foucault: biopolitics. In the third part, we discuss the institutionalization of pharmacovigilance and its effects on the exercise of health professionals and the lives of medication users. In the fourth and final part, we discuss the positivity of a power that normalizes and regulates the population body, the biopower that, acting through pharmacovigilance, allows the visibility of medical practices and the appearance of the body as privileged places for demonstrating the efficacy and safety of drugs, announcing that the body is a biopolitical reality.