Essentialising medicines

Abstract Digital technologies used to make pharmaceuticals trustworthy promise to displace historical relations, offering instead transparency through data. This article draws from research with manufacturers, importers, and distributors moving medicines between factories and markets to explore trust-making and trustworthiness in pharmaceutical sales. It shows how practices of selling and regulating pharmaceuticals rely on narratives and technologies of safety, risk, trust, and essentialised notions of industrial origin. Following the medicines shows how, rather than displacing social knowledge with data, technologies of trust rely on situated knowledge of institutions and social relations that are the source of both trust and suspicion. Ultimately, both narratives and pharmaceuticals are stabilised through notions of trust as linked to identity in ways that implicate ethnographic as well as industrial practices.