Drugged ecologies: The case of pharmaceutical pollution

Gergely Mohácsi

Chapter 14 in Handbook of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology Studies, 2026, pp 228-245 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter examines the environmental impact of pharmaceuticals, focusing on the ecological consequences of their production, use, and disposal. The rapid expansion of human health and well-being has come at an environmental cost, as large quantities of human and veterinary drugs enter rivers and soils through manufacturing waste, hospital discharge, and urban sewage. Drawing on research in Science and Technology Studies and medical anthropology, as well as ethnographic fieldwork in northern Vietnam and western Japan, the chapter situates pharmaceutical pollution within wider infrastructures of care, toxicity, and mending. Using Alex Nading's concept of “leakage” and Michelle Murphy's notion of “chemical regimes of living,” it argues that drugs are inherently entangled with ecosystems and urban infrastructures rather than existing as isolated commodities. The two ethnographic accounts of medicinal plant gardens in East Asia illustrate how communities reimagine healing and environmental restoration amid pharmaceutical contamination. By following the ecological afterlives of medicines, the chapter highlights their relational and multispecies dimensions and calls for a “terrestrial politics” of living with pharmaceutical waste – one that links ecological reparation to the ethics of coexistence and imaginaries of planetary health.

Keywords: Chemical regimes of living; Leakage; Infrastructural; Multispecies coexistence; Looping effects; Infrastructural inversion; Terrestrial politics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035338443
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