The drugs don't sell: DIY heart health and the over-the-counter statin experience

This paper draws on a study of over-the-counter statins to provide a critical account of the figure of the ‘pharmaceutical consumer’ as a key actor in the pharmaceuticalisation literature. A low dose statin, promising to reduce cardiovascular risk, was reclassified to allow sale in pharmacies in the UK in 2004. We analysed professional and policy debates about the new product, promotional and sales information, and interviews with consumers and potential consumers conducted between 2008 and 2011, to consider the different consumer identities invoked by these diverse actors. While policymakers constructed an image of ‘the citizen-consumer’ who would take responsibility for heart health through exercising the choice to purchase a drug that was effectively rationed on the NHS and medical professionals raised concerns about ‘a flawed consumer’ who was likely to misuse the product, both these groups assumed that there would be a market for the drug. By contrast, those who bought the product or potentially fell within its target market might appear as ‘health consumers’, seeking out and paying for different food and lifestyle products and services, including those targeting high cholesterol. However, they were reluctant ‘pharmaceutical consumers’ who either preferred to take medication on the advice of a doctor, or sought to minimize medicine use. In comparison to previous studies, our analysis builds understanding of individual consumers in a market, rather than collective action for access to drugs (or, less commonly, compensation for adverse effects). Where some theories of pharmaceuticalisation have presented consumers as creating pressure for expanding markets, our data suggests that sociologists should be cautious about assuming there will be demand for new pharmaceutical products, especially those aimed at prevention or asymptomatic conditions, even in burgeoning health markets

The interactions of disability and impairment

Theoretical work on disability is going through an expansive period, built on the growing recognition of disability studies as a discipline and out of the political and analytical push to bring disability into a prominent position within accounts of the intersecting social categories that shape people's lives. A current debate within critical disability studies is whether that study should include impairment and embodiment within its focus. This article argues it should and does so by drawing from symbolic interactionism and embodiment literatures in order to explore how differences in what bodies can do-defined as impairments-come to play a role in how people make sense of themselves through social interaction. We argue that these everyday interactions and the stories we tell within them and about them are important spaces and narratives through which impairment and disability are produced. Interactions and stories are significant both in how they are shaped by wider social norms, collective stories and institutional processes, and also how they at times can provide points of resistance and challenges to such norms, stories and institutions. Therefore, the significance of impairment and interaction is the role they play in both informing self-identity and also broader dynamics of power and inequality

Women who kill their abusers: how Queensland\u27s new abusive domestic relationships defence continues to ignore reality

Queensland has been the last Australian jurisdiction to reform its law of criminal defences to try and take account of the difficulties faced by victims of domestic abuse in satisfying the traditional elements of self defence. Section 304B of the Queensland Criminal Code was designed to create a partial defence for victims of domestic violence who, fearing for their lives, kill their abusers in circumstances that would otherwise constitute murder. Usually, these cases involve killing in the absence of a triggering assault or where the feared harm is not imminent. The partial defence provides that the accused will be found guilty of manslaughter only, thereby allowing for judicial discretion in sentencing. This paper argues that the new provision is ineffective and, in fact, puts victims of abuse who kill in a more difficult tactical position than if it had not been enacted. The theory of criminal responsibility (juxtaposing justification and excuse) and various moral theories are used to argue that victims of serious abuse who kill their abuser should be entitled to an acquittal, even without a triggering assault and even if the threat posed by the abuser is not immediate

A consideration of the merits of specialised homicide offences and defences for battered women

In response to calls for reform, some jurisdictions have introduced specialised offences and defences for battered women who kill their abuser. In 2005, Victoria introduced the offence of ‘defensive homicide’. More recently, in 2010, Queensland introduced a defence titled ‘killing for preservation in an abusive domestic relationship’. If successful these approaches result in a conviction of defensive homicide and manslaughter respectively. While defensive homicide has been explored in a number of cases in Victoria; the Queensland defence has only been considered on a few occasions to date. This article reviews the underlying debates relating to these developments and then examines recent case law to consider the application of these two approaches and their effectiveness in light of what they were designed to achieve. The article concludes that the reforms may have resulted in some unintended consequences