by Anne Pollock

About Anne Pollock

Anne Pollock is a professor of global health and social medicine at King’s College London. She is the author of Sickening: Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States.

Drug

Whether licit or illicit, drugs are richly material-semiotic objects: this means that they carry both matter and meaning. Even as drugs are concrete objects with the capacity to reorder our bodies on a molecular level, that is never all that they do. For their consumers—and also for their makers, distributors, and even observers—the physiological impacts of drugs are inseparable from meaning making.