Countering the logics of war in global health policy: fake drugs, antimicrobial resistance, and fugitive science.

Powerful pharmaceuticals are readily available for purchase throughout Tanzania and global health policy makers decry this situation as dangerous and disordered, as if no rules govern the use of drugs in Africa. In the prevailing global health understanding, 'truth' lies in the laboratory science that goes into the making and proper prescription of drugs, and such deviations as 'overuse' and 'misuse' result from the fact that locals supposedly misunderstand what these drugs are and how they should be used. However, my ethnographic research in Tanzania reveals that embodied epistemologies frequently enable medical practitioners and patients to evaluate the quality of various drugs and to identify (substandard or adulterated) pharmaceuticals through their material and sensory qualities-a practice I conceptualize as a form of 'fugitive science' (Rusert 2017).