Killer Applications: The Racial Pharmacology of Antipsychotics and Metabolic Syndrome.

In this paper, I argue that pharmacological research on antipsychotics and the metabolic syndrome is a site for the technoscientific transformation of race. The metabolic syndrome is a new biomedical classification whose meanings and applications vary widely across research contexts. These new intersections of professional psychiatry, government psychiatric epidemiology, and pharmaceutical capitalism have created a context in which constructions of the metabolic syndrome are used to target particular raced bodies and racial populations in the contexts of pharmaceutical research and development on antipsychotics. Schizophrenia researchers use the metabolic syndrome as a way of analyzing the adverse side effects of atypical antipsychotics in racially categorized populations. I analyze the technoscientific, economic, and political forces that shape the production of knowledge about African Americans' drug metabolism of antipsychotics. In particular, I deconstruct the theories of race that are deployed to ask questions about African Americans' drug metabolism of antipsychotics. I show how drug researchers use conceptions of race, metabolism, and schizophrenia in antipsychotics research in ways that transform administrative taxonomies of race into biological and genetic taxonomies of race. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]