Mortal Medicine: The Social Life of a Death-Inducing Pharmaceutical

MORTALMED is an anthropological project that investigates the global movements and local uses of sodium pentobarbital (SP) as a pharmaceutical that is employed primarily to facilitate both voluntary and coerced death. Using a mixed-methods approach, MORTALMED reassembles the social life of SP, focusing on how its life-cycle intersects with historically and culturally situated forms of governance and emerging necro-socialities—spaces of sociality where death is actively managed, governed, and produced. The project traces SP’s circulation across three key contexts: (1) assisted dying in Switzerland, (2) state-sanctioned executions in the United States, and (3) its over-the-counter commercialisation in Mexico. These practices reveal how pharmaceuticals intersect with legal, medical, and political systems, governing life and death unevenly across varied socio-political landscapes. By focusing on SP as a pharmakon—both remedy and poison—the project uncovers how pharmaceuticals function beyond health contexts, exposing the broader socio-political dynamics and power structures that both shape and are shaped by their use. MORTALMED seeks to unveil how SP’s movement through formal and informal networks reflects and reinforces socio-economic and racial inequalities. By reassembling SP’s socio-cultural biography, the project offers a critical perspective on how pharmaceuticals contribute to the governance of life and death, providing insights into the contemporary and future implications of pharmaceutical-mediated death.