When John Abraham first started working on pharmaceuticals in the late 1980s for his doctorate in politics, sociology and STS, the field of ‘pharmaceuticals & society’ did not exist. Major studies of pharmaceuticals in the humanities and social sciences were few and far between – Jonathan Braithwaite’s 1984 criminological analysis in his book Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry published by Routledge and Jonathan Liebenau’s 1987 historical work on the formation of the American pharmaceutical industry during the 19th century being notable, but fairly isolated, exceptions. In 1991, Jonathan Gabe also brought together an edited collection on the social science of tranquillizer use, but little of this was sustained into a field beyond benzodiazepines with none of the contributors subsequently producing an authored research book on any aspect of pharmaceuticals.
From the early 1990s to the present, John Abraham has brought the full weight of history, sociology, political science, and STS to bear on sustained analysis of pharmaceuticals for decades and is widely acknowledged to have originated the field of ‘Pharmaceuticals & Society’ within the social sciences. By the early 2000s, medical anthropology had also come on board with Cambridge University Press’s book The Social Lives of Medicines. Evidently, the field of ‘Pharmaceuticals & Society is highly interdisciplinary and continues to attract contributions from those with backgrounds outside the social sciences, such as medicine and pharmacy. Meta-theoretically, John adopts and has brought a realist social scientific stance to frame the field in opposition to relativism, constructivism and positivism. Most major studies in the field have retained either a realist or positivist orientation. Theoretically, he is particularly well-known for inventing and testing corporate bias and neo-liberal corporate bias theories of regulation since the early 1990s; for inventing a rigorously testable definition of bias in science for use in political/sociological analysis and STS; for inventing the concept of the permissive principle in the 2000s regarding drug testing and evaluation by the pharmaceutical industry and government agencies; and for introducing the concepts of pharmaceuticalization and the patient-industrial complex to the world of sociology in the 2000s. John’s empirical investigations of pharmaceuticals are characterized by a methodological synthesis of three analytical levels: macro-political; meso-organizational; and micro-sociological. Such macro-political investigations are often international and historical in scope, frequently involving international comparative analysis in time and space. John’s meso-organizational studies have included the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the UK Department of Health’s Medicines Division, the UK’s Committee on Safety of Drugs (CSD), the UK’s Committee on Safety of Medicines (CSM), the UK’s Medicines Control Agency (MCA), the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the UK’s National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), the Swedish Medical Products Agency (MPA), the German Federal Institute for Medicinal Products and Devices (BfArM), the European Union (EU)’s European Medicines Agency (EMA), the International Conference on Harmonization of Technical Requirements for Registration of Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH), Eli Lilly, McNeil Laboratories, Upjohn, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, and Bayer, while his micro-sociological investigations have led him to examine non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, painkillers, sleeping pills, tranquillizers, beta-blockers, anti-depressants, diabetes drugs, cancer drugs, antibiotics, IBS drugs, heart-rhythm drugs, obesity drugs, and pregnancy-test pills, among others.