About the Series
Co-hosted by the Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing and the Centre for Global Health at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health
The corporation is arguably the most powerful social and economic institution globally, with unprecedented power to shape scientific evidence, public policy, and lifestyles. Corporations share practices including advertising, public relations, and lobbying that are common across industries and which impact population health and health equity. For example, non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are currently the leading cause of mortality globally and account for 71% of all deaths according to the World Health Organization (WHO).1 The main risk factors for developing NCDs as identified by the WHO include harmful alcohol drinking, tobacco use, physical inactivity, and the consumption of unhealthy diets rich in overly processed foods.2 The United Nations has addressed NCDs in their Sustainable Development Goal target 3.4, which is to reduce premature mortality from NCDs by a third by 2030.3 At the same time, the medically-related industry, including pharmaceutical, medical device, infant formula, and health technology companies have pervasive influence over the production of health evidence, the dissemination of health innovations, and the development of clinical practice and health policy. Critical public health analysis of the power of the corporate sector in influencing public health outcomes informed the field referred to as the commercial determinants of health. The Lancet Global Health defines the commercial determinants of health as “strategies and approaches used by the private sector to promote products and choices that are detrimental to health”.4 Corporate practices can thus be critically examined and strategically challenged in order to contribute to healthy, evidence-based public policy solutions. The Dalla Lana School of Public Health’s Centre for Global Health in partnership with the Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing at the University of Toronto hosted a seminar series entitled Health Inc.: Corporations, Capitalism, and the Commercial Determinants of Health. The objective of this seminar series is to create a forum to promote conversations, research training and collaboration across sectors and disciplines regarding the impact of corporations on health. Themes explored during the seminar series included but were not limited to industry’s role in harm reduction, public-private partnerships, conflicts of interests, industry sponsorship and conduct of research, health data and data justice, sustainable health care, and the role of corporations in the climate crisis and inequities.
- World Health Organization. Non communicable diseases. World Health Organization; 2021.
- World Health Organization. Noncommunicable diseases country profiles 2018. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization; 2018.
- NCD Countdown 2030 collaborators. (2020). NCD Countdown 2030: pathways to achieving Sustainable Development Goal target 3.4. Lancet Public Health. 396(10255): 918-934 https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31761-X
Kickbusch, I., Allen, L., Franz, C. (2016). The commercial determinates of health. Lancet. 4(12): 895-896, https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(16)30217-0
Upcoming Events
Health Inc. Seminar Series: Analyzing Corporate Power Through Networks
Mapping Industry Influence: Network Methods for Analyzing Corporate Power in Global Health Systems Featuring Dr. Andrea Bowra, a post-doctoral research fellow with the Subject Matter Lab at Humber River Health […]
January 29, 2026
Our Team
Quinn Grundy, Associate Professor
Dr. Grundy’s research explores the interactions between the medically-related industry, including pharmaceutical and medical device companies, and public health systems and the implications for the delivery of health services, health evidence, and health policies. Dr. Grundy is the author of Infiltrating Healthcare: How Marketing Works Underground to Influence Nurses (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), which details the first in-depth study of the ways that registered nurses interact with pharmaceutical and medical device company representatives.
Dr. Grundy serves as the Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Governance, Accountability, and Transparency in the Pharmaceutical Sector , and is cross-appointed to the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Toronto. She serves as Associate Director, Nursing, for the Collaborative Centre for Climate, Health, and Sustainable Care, a multi-faculty unit at the University of Toronto. In these roles, Dr. Grundy leads and supports efforts to improve the governance and sustainability of health technology systems through research, education, practice change and policy development
Erica Di Ruggiero, Associate Professor
Erica is the Director of the Centre for Global Health and Director of the Collaborative Specialization of Global Health at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. She is an Associate Professor of Global Health in the Division of Social and Behavioural Health Sciences and holds non-budgetary cross-appointments as Associate Professor in the Institute of Health Policy Management and Evaluation, and the Department of Health & Society (UTSC). She is a Full Member of the School of Graduate Studies. Her research focuses on evaluating the health and gender equity impacts of different policies and interventions on structurally marginalized groups in public, private and non-profit sectors within and outside of health.
Matthew Tracey, PhD student IHPME
Matthew Tracey is a registered nurse and a Doctoral Student in Health Policy with the Institute for Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto. His research interests include: the political economy of health, the financialization of healthcare, and social epidemiology. He works as an RN at Women’s College Hospital and as a Clinical Research Nurse Coordinator at the Hospital for Sick Children.
Daniel Eisenkraft Klein, PhD
Daniel Eisenkraft Klein is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Program on Regulation, Therapeutics, and Law (PORTAL) at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He was a co-founder of the Health Inc. Seminar Series. His program of work primarily focuses on the political economy and regulation of medicines, with a particular emphasis on the influence of stakeholder groups in opioid and psychedelic policy settings.
Seminar Archives
About the seminar:
Inadequate access to appropriate medicines contributes significantly to morbidity and mortality among children, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Children have unique needs at each stage of development, warranting access to child-appropriate medicines to improve treatment outcomes and reduce mortality rates. However, many countries continue to experience shortages of child-appropriate medicines, which represents a market failure: due to small market sizes and regulatory requirements, manufacturers often forgo product development specifically for this population. Following experiences of severe health product shortages exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, many nations globally are investing in building local pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity. In this seminar, Dr. Siyawamwaya will discuss how pharmaceutical policies and industry initiatives in Zimbabwe and the United Kingdom affect access to medicines for children. She will examine the nexus of health policy and industry policy, as one important lens for evaluating the commercial activities of the pharmaceutical industry as they pertain to an often-overlooked population segment.
About the seminar:
Modern healthcare is deeply associated with economic growth. For some decades, evidence has been mounting that the negative consequences of economic growth may eventually counteract its benefits. Consumption is a key driver of economic growth, however, overconsumption in many sectors of the economy directly and indirectly harms health. Healthcare systems, especially in high-income countries, are also characterized by overconsumption resulting in harm to patients, communities and the natural environment. In this talk, Professor Martin Hensher will present perspectives from health and ecological economics that address the mechanisms of these problems and consider how they might be tackled.
About the Seminar:
After 18 months of negotiations, in November 2024, representatives of 200 nations failed to come to agreement around the terms of a multilateral, legally binding treaty to mitigate the harms of plastic pollution. A coalition of oil-producing nations and industry groups opposed capping plastic production, arguing that efforts should only focus on managing waste. Proposed text for the treaty also included a blanket exemption of plastic products for medical and health uses and responses to public health emergencies. In this seminar, we will examine discourses around single-use, disposable, plastic products in healthcare including the ways that medically-related industry has promoted the idea that these products are not only convenient, but necessary. We will discuss the need for counter-measures to resist efforts by the petrochemical industry to undermine the precautionary principle, explore how to support other stakeholders, like engineers and manufacturers exploring alternatives to single-use plastics, and ask how healthcare can play a leading role in mitigating the health harms of plastic.
About the seminar:
The idea of wellness is particularly powerful in contemporary culture and the emphasis on individuals to maintain and optimize their health and mitigate risks received renewed emphasis through and following the COVID-19 pandemic. The pursuit of wellness has spawned an industry marketing natural health products, including supplements and other therapies positioned in contrast to medicines produced by the pharmaceutical industry and serving as the key tools of biomedicine. In this seminar, we will discuss why wellness sells, drawing from humanities scholarship on the rhetoric of health and wellness, and examining the self-generating argument that work to promote and sustain wellness-seeking behaviours. Though not immediately visible, these arguments work to drive markets and shape consumption patterns and how people think about their risk, health, and what it means to be well.
About the seminar:
This presentation will introduce the global nature and the complexity of supply chains as a key commercial determinant of health, focusing on their pivotal role in the pharmaceutical industry and the critical issue of drug shortages. We will explore how supply chain disruptions lead to drug shortages, illustrated by recent case studies and evidence, and highlight the interconnectedness of global supply chains. We will explore the inequities in supply chains, and their disproportionate impact on low- and middle-income countries that face greater challenges in securing a stable supply of essential drugs. The wide-ranging consequences of supply chain breakdowns, including increased harm, higher healthcare costs, and exacerbation of existing health disparities, will be examined. Finally, we will discuss potential solutions and strategies to strengthen supply chains, policy recommendations, and the importance of international collaboration to ensure a more resilient and equitable supply chain system.
About the Seminar:
The financialization of health refers to the growing influence of the financial sector in health care delivery and population health. Financial firms, financial elites, and other financial actors are increasingly acquiring, selling, trading, and investing in health care entities. At the same time, the financial system is heavily integrated in housing, education, agriculture, and a range of other sectors of the economy that shape the social determinants of health. This seminar will discuss financialization as it relates to private equity and health care delivery – detailing the current evidence of private equity and its impacts on health outcomes, provider organizations, and health care financing. The seminar will cover a range of medical settings where private equity is gaining prominence including hospitals, nursing homes, physician practices, and women’s health.
About the seminar:
Global private actors and interests have key influence on health in sub-Saharan Africa, given corporate roles in colonial and post-colonial systems, and the current impact of global rule systems, including on policy latitude and local power to address issues in the continent. Commercial actors operating in sub-Saharan Africa increase their own power through advancing ideas, narratives and discursive power, using mechanisms of agential power and taking advantage of the structural power of free markets and for profit commerce being viewed as essential for wellbeing. Sub-Saharan Africa actors are however challenging narratives that weaken public health and building their own discursive power, engaging on agential power, including in taking visible public health action in areas that matter to the public, and engaging at the level of the structural power, such as in harmonising regional standards, protecting smallholder food producers; or engaging on the TRIPS Waiver. The diversity and expansion of commercial impacts found in sub-Saharan Africa suggest that piecemeal interventions on the commercial determinants of health, while necessary, may be insufficient to address the scale of threat or the loss of potential opportunity in this area. This presentation and discussion explore actions and platforms that may be critical for ensuring public interest voice on policies that better support synergies between social, ecological, and economic wellbeing.
About the seminar:
The rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines showcased the promise of rapid translation of research into global health interventions. However, countries in the Global South faced, and continue to face, great difficulties in accessing vaccines. This seminar will discuss the root causes of global disparities in access to COVID-19 vaccines, including key commercial determinants of health such as the commodification of essential medicines and intellectual property regimes. Low and middle-income countries, and especially African nations, prioritized a TRIPS wavier and regional manufacturing capacity as ways to address vaccine equity. In this seminar, researchers will discuss initiatives on the African continent around vaccine manufacturing and the promises and challenges posed by vaccine hoarding, intellectual property rights, pricing, global health law and pandemic treaties to discuss the current state of vaccine equity and what might happen in a future pandemic.
About the seminar:
The talk will introduce the gambling industry as a commercial determinant of health. Using the UK as a case study, the presentation will examine how and why gambling industry-favourable policy systems emerge and the strategies used by the gambling industry to resist policy change that threaten its commercial interests. This will involve examining the role of the production of ignorance and the public health implications of these strategies and what can done to support the type of policy change that is needed to protect people from the products and practices of the gambling industry.
About the seminar:
With a ‘boom’ in the global milk formula market, researchers, public health professionals, and policymakers have raised serious concerns about the impacts for breastfeeding, and child and maternal health. Despite this scrutiny of the global milk formula industry, there has been less investigation of the global expansion of the baby food industry, nor the activities and strategies of the corporations that seek to grow and sustain these markets. market and political practices corporations have used to grow and sustain their markets. In this seminar presentation, Dr Mialon will explore the various practices through which the baby food industry influences infant and young child feeding. These practices include medical marketing, manufacturing public support, and shaping evidence, for example. Dr Mialon will discuss some of the key risks associated with engaging with the baby food industry for researchers and health professionals.
About the seminar:
Nurses account for half of the global healthcare workforce, providing autonomous and collaborative care for people across the lifespan and care settings. Nurses play critical roles in health promotion, disease prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation, and in the organization, management, and leadership of health systems. Consequently, nurses frequently interact with representatives of the medically-related industry with implications for access to, selection of, and administration of health technologies such as pharmaceuticals and medical devices. Nurses also have unique knowledge and are often witness to the impacts of the activities and practices of commercial entities on health, which can inform effective health promotion and disease prevention. In this seminar, we will discuss the relevance of the commercial determinants of health to global nursing practice and the ways that nurses are uniquely situated to advance work in this field in research and practice toward goals of population health equity.
About the seminar:
Climate change poses a growing threat to global health due to extreme weather events, loss of biodiversity, risk of zoonotic disease outbreaks, heat stress, and poor air quality. Such threats also pose challenges for safe and effective healthcare, including through risks to reliable supply, safe infrastructure and accessible and high quality health services. Paradoxically, healthcare is a surprisingly significant contributor to climate change and other environmental harms, estimated at more than 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Yet pollution from the health sector is not primarily a function of buildings. Instead, it arises from the ways in which care is organized and delivered and the products that are used, including from the manufacturing, transportation, delivery, use and disposal of the drugs, devices, and other products that healthcare organizations consume. Manufacturers of medical products and services, termed the ‘medically-related industry,’ thus have an outsized role in healthcare pollution and climate adaptation, given their role in the design, manufacture, transportation, and promotion of medical products within health systems. As health systems move to reduce these challenges, through innovations in the ways that medical products can be reused or repurposed, changes to intellectual property to support distributed and locally responsive refurbishment and manufacturing, and efforts to reduce consumption, commercial interests may be challenged. In this seminar, we will discuss the roles and accountabilities of the medically-related industry given global, World Health Organization-supported efforts to deliver climate resilient, low carbon and sustainable health systems.
About the seminar:
The commercial determinants of health (CDOH) has emerged as a unifying concept bringing together a growing number of researchers studying a broad range of public health concerns. These include substance use (e.g. tobacco, alcohol, prescription drugs, cannabis), unhealthy products (e.g. sugary drinks, ultra highly processed foods), and other major human health risks (e.g. road traffic accidents, gun violence, air quality and extractive industries, deforestation and zoonotic diseases, agriculture sector and antimicrobial resistance). The rapidly growing evidence on the links between the CDOH and health outcomes has gained the attention of practitioners and advocacy groups. Opportunities for deeper and lasting change, however, require closer engagement with policy makers who are responsible for shaping priorities, creating regulatory frameworks, and allocating public resources for the benefit of societies. This brief talk focuses on lessons for effective engagement with policy makers on the CDOH drawn from experiences at the global, national and local levels.
About the seminar:
Intertwined with colonialism and dispossession, Indigenous communities are disproportionately impacted by the commercial determinants of health. Poor access to healthy foods, environmental degradation, inadequate access to healthcare, and targeted marketing are all likely to be greater felt by Indigenous individuals and communities. The activities of the tobacco, food and beverage, the infant formula industry, pharmaceutical, alcohol and gambling industries continue to play significant roles in shaping Indigenous health outcomes.
Dr. Amy Shawanda and Daniel Eisenkraft Klein recently wrote a paper on the topic, and are currently recording a podcast series on how commercial interests negatively impact Indigenous health, funded by Defining Moments Canada. They will provide a broad overview of how the CDOH impact Indigenous communities, with case studies of how these intertwine with broader political and structural forces.
About the seminar:
Representatives of medically-related industry, including pharmaceutical, medical device, infant formula, food, and health technology companies, are present within healthcare settings on a day-to-day basis, providing education or clinical support. Industry expertise is generally considered necessary to inform clinicians about new developments in the field and for the safe and competent use of drugs, devices, and equipment. Companies also routinely sponsor educational events for health professionals, research, and other services and projects that are not funded through the public health system. However. most industry representatives work concurrently in a sales capacity, creating competing incentives that are not always consistent with health system or patient interests. To date, most research and policy scrutiny of relationships between health professionals and industry has focused on physicians. Studies have found that even nominal payments from drug manufacturers to physicians, including free food and beverages, are associated with increased prescribing of higher-cost, brand name drugs. Though understudied, nurses, pharmacists, dieticians, and other members of the interprofessional healthcare team also routinely interact with industry representatives including serving as ‘key opinion leaders,’ and receive industry payments for research, education, consulting, advising, and speaking for industry, much like their physician colleagues. In this interactive workshop, an interprofessional panel will describe and discuss the nature of relationships with industry within their field and participants will work through case studies to discuss strategies to ethically interact with industry in ways that are consistent with the interests of patients and the public health system.
About the seminar:
The second in-person seminar of this series will explore the nature of human mobility, global extraction of labour, gig economies, precarious work, and urban poverty. We invite you to join David Kinitz (MSW and Ph.D candidate in the Social and Behavioural Health Sciences Division, Dalla Lana School of Public Health) and Dr. Andrea Cortinois (Ph.D., Institute of Health Policy, Management and Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, cross appointed between the Human Biology Program, Faculty of Arts and Science, and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health) for this interactive seminar on November 16th.
About the seminar:
Corporations, due to the way that they are structured, have a set of practices that are common across industries including advertising, public relations, sponsorship of scientific research, litigation, and lobbying, which are designed to maximize revenue, minimize costs, and create favourable regulatory environments. Corporations are legally mandated to maximize shareholder value and thus these activities seek to expand markets and indications for a product’s use, decrease barriers to market entry, create permissive standards for advertising and promotion, and reduce corporate tax. The result is a tendency toward hyper consumption, deregulation, and financialization, which have negative impacts on population and environmental health. These practices, however, can be critically examined and strategically challenged to promote health-promoting, equitable, and sustainable public policy solutions. The health, social, and economic inequities exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic – from inequities in global vaccine roll outs to disparities in health outcomes related to working conditions – have made understanding and addressing the commercial determinants of health an urgent public health priority. The World Health Organization recently launched a new programme of action, the Economic and Commercial Determinants of Health, which has four goals: to strengthen the evidence base; develop tools and capacity to address the commercial determinants; convene partnerships and dialogue; and raise awareness and advocacy (WHO, 2022). Kicking off the second season of Health Inc – The urgency of studying corporate influences on health and healthcare – will provide an overview of the dynamics of multi-national corporate industries, health policy and the subsequent population health outcomes, and the public health movements that seek to challenge the “corporate playbook.” We invite you to join co-chairs Erica Di Ruggiero (Associate Professor of Global Health and Director of the Centre for Global Health), Quinn Grundy (Assistant Professor at the Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing) and Daniel Eisenkraft Klein (PhD Candidate, Social and Behavioural Health Sciences at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health) for this interactive seminar and networking opportunity
About the seminar :
The corporation is arguably the most powerful social and economic institution globally, with unprecedented power to shape scientific evidence, public policy, and lifestyles such as dietary behaviours. In this seminar, we feature two speakers who will 1) critically interrogate the positioning of the food industry as a legitimate partner for the public sector and the resulting impacts; and, 2) explore the challenges with voluntary commitments, which maximize flexibility for the food industry, but that can impede the creation of a healthier food supply and food environment. Two presentations were featured in this seminar
The normalisation of ineffective partnerships between the food industry and government to improve diets
The food industry uses the rhetoric of collaboration to normalise its role in research and policy. One of the most complex aspects of this phenomenon is the industry’s positioning as a legitimate partner in global food and nutrition. This has led to the increasing acceptance of arrangements such as public-private partnerships to improve health, and voluntary mechanisms whereby commercial actors design and monitor their own standards of conduct. This seminar explores these themes and shares empirical evidence of the effectiveness of such approaches, and the complex industry strategies supporting them.
The effectiveness of voluntary food company commitments in helping to create a healthier Canadian food supply
The packaged food supply in Canada is dominated by energy-dense products high in nutrients of public health concern, increasing Canadians’ risk of developing obesity and non-communicable diseases. Many packaged food and beverage companies voluntarily commit to improving the nutritional quality of their products; monitoring is needed to hold companies accountable for these commitments and thereby prompt improvements. Recent studies indicate that many of Canada’s leading packaged food and beverage companies have not made meaningful improvements to the nutritional quality of their products in the last few years; however, there is considerable variation between companies in terms of their product (re)formulation actions and commitments. This presentation will give an overview of these findings and highlight challenges with voluntary commitments in creating a healthier Canadian food supply and food environment.
About the seminar:
This seminar focused on better understanding the cross-cutting strategies that health-harming industries employ to impact public health policies.
The illicit trade in legal drugs is often seen as a law enforcement issue. Focusing on the case studies of tobacco and cannabis, Benoît Gomis demonstrated it is also a significant public health challenge, in which transnational corporations are playing a major part. The tobacco industry has often been directly involved or complicit in smuggling their own products, while playing a central but dubious role in shaping research, policy making, and law enforcement practices on the topic. Major Canadian cannabis companies are increasingly mimicking some Big Tobacco tactics, in the name of anti-illicit trade and at the expense of public health.
About the seminar:
Famously, tobacco industry executives were quoted as saying, “doubt is our product.” The study of internal documents across tobacco, alcohol, chemical, soft drink, sugar, and pharmaceutical industries has produced a body of evidence describing the ways that corporations seek to generate and disseminate research findings that are favourable to their interests, to suppress findings that are not, and to generate doubt around scientific consensus.
In this seminar, we will have guest speakers detail their current research into the activities of corporations related to the production, funding, and dissemination of scientific research. We will discuss key questions about how to detect biases, minimize and prevent industry influence, and address the distortion of research agendas by commercial interests.
The commercial determinants of health are those activities of the private sector that affect the health of populations. Funding and disseminating unreliable or misleading research are ways that corporations can influence decisions about health. This seminar presented empirical evidence of corporate influence on health research and explored how this influence occurred throughout the entire cycle of the research process. Guest speakers also summarized ongoing efforts to decrease commercial influences on health research.
About the seminar:
Corporate activities including research, development, manufacturing, marketing, advertising, and sales are typically regulated, though the regulatory processes and requirements differ across jurisdictions. This is even more the case for corporations which manufacture health-related products such as pharmaceuticals, or products that may be harmful to health, such as tobacco and alcohol. Thus, the commercial determinants of health are in part, a complex product of the interactions between corporations and regulators.
In this seminar, we will have guest speakers detail their current research into the reactions and responses of corporations to regulatory actions. We will discuss key questions about the relative roles and responsibilities of corporations and regulators for population health and well-being.
For example, drug companies typically defend the use of their drugs when new safety problems are uncovered. Does the same apply to when drugs are removed from the market because of safety problems? This talk will examine this question from the Canadian point of view and secondarily look at whether the quality of the evidence leading to a withdrawal influences the responses from companies. Finally, the talk will raise the question of whether company responses affect how Health Canada deals with safety issues.
Similarly, regulating alcohol corporations is key to controlling alcohol consumption and harm because they have capacities to both influence the designs of and avoid the effects of alcohol control policies. Using three examples from Thailand, our guest speakers will discuss how alcohol companies can influence and benefit from alcohol taxation policy design and also adjust their alcohol advertising behaviours to avoid the effects of the alcohol advertising control law. We will discuss contemporary regulatory challenges including advertising via social media, which often crosses national boundaries and regulatory jurisdictions.
About the seminar:
Industry denormalisation as a public health and policy strategy is applicable to several public health problems. These include the epidemic of tobacco-related disease, the current opioid overdose crisis, and emerging issues related to the legalisation of cannabis. Originating in the field of tobacco control, industry denormalisation is a strategy that aims to make visible and address the industrial sources of public health harms resulting from the promotion of hyper-consumption, deceptive marketing practices, or industry interference in scientific research or public policy. Numerous industries that manufacture products that may be harmful to health, including tobacco, alcohol, and prescription drugs, have sought protection from legal and regulatory action by promoting the discourse that they are normal, legal industries selling normal, legal products. Advocates of industry denormalisation seek to reverse this process.
Industry denormalisation is frequently perceived to be at odds with a harm reduction approach. For example, the tobacco control community is polarised in relation to the promotion of e-cigarettes to reduce the harms of cigarette smoking and potential partnerships with tobacco or e-cigarette companies in achieving this goal. A similar trend may be occurring with the opioid overdose crisis. Ongoing litigation against opioid manufacturers suggests the promotional activities of the pharmaceutical industry including sponsorship of pain-related educational materials and activities were the initial drivers of over-prescription and the resulting opioid-related morbidity and mortality. In looking to reduce the harms related to the toxic supply of street fentanyl, however, clinicians, researchers, and policymakers remain open to industry partnerships designed to widely disseminate and promote the use of opioid agonists such as buprenorphine-naloxone.
After decades of prohibition, corporations that produce psychedelic compounds such as psilocybin, MDMA, and ketamine have emerged as a multi-billion dollar industry akin to multinational industries commonly known as Big Pharma and Big Tobacco. Research into the potential for psychedelic therapies is enjoying a renaissance in psychiatric research largely due to an easing of some regulatory barriers, shifting public attitudes, and the lack of new treatments in psychiatry pipeline. Much like Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, and Big Food, psychedelic corporations have begun to engage in activities such as the sponsorship of scientific research. Given the limited funding options for publicly funded research, many researchers and institutions are faced with the familiar ethical dilemmas about financial entanglements with industry and conflicts of interest.
This seminar examined ways that industry denormalisation and harm reduction might work synergistically to create safer environments for substance use.
About the seminar:
Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are currently the leading cause of mortality globally.1 Most NDCs are largely preventable and can be significantly attributed to the consumption of highly processed foods, excess alcohol, and tobacco driven by unhealthy commodity industries.2 At the same time, the medically-related industry, including pharmaceutical, medical device, infant formula, and health technology companies have pervasive influence over the production of health evidence, the dissemination of health innovations, and the development of clinical practice and health policy. NCDs are thus widely being regarded as the product of a complex system influenced by powerful corporate actors involved in public health policy that directly impact global health outcomes. The first seminar session of Health Inc – Corporate influences on health and healthcare –provided a thorough overview of the intricate dynamics of multi-national corporate industries, health policy and the subsequent health outcomes they influence. This session was co-chaired by Erica Di Ruggiero, Associate Professor of Global Health and Director of the Centre for Global Health, Quinn Grundy, Assistant Professor at the Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing and Daniel Eisenkraft Klein, a PhD student (social and behavioural health sciences) at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.
Resource Library
Glover RE, Petticrew MP. (2021). Defining the commercial determinants of health after COVID-19., European Journal of Public Health, 31(3). Doi:10.1093/eurpub/ckab164.808
World Health Organization. Commercial determinants of health. (2022). https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/commercial-determinants-of-health
Lee, K & Freudenberg, N. Public health roles in addressing commercial determinants of health. Annual Review of Public Health, 2022 43:1, 375-395. doi:10.1146/annurev-publhealth-052220-020447
Lacy-Nichols J, Marten R, Crosbie E, Moodie R. (2022). The public health playbook: ideas for challenging the corporate playbook. Lancet Global Health, 10(7), e1067 – e1072. doi:10.1016/S2214-109X(22)00185-1
Knai, C et al. (2021). The case for developing a cohesive systems approach to research across unhealthy commodity industries. BMJ Global Health, 6(2), e003543. doi.org:10.1136/bmjgh-2020-003543
Knai, C., Petticrew, M., Mays, N., Capewell, S., Cassidy, R., Cummins, S., Eastmure, E., Fafard, P., Hawkins, B., Jensen, J., Katikireddi, S., Mwatsama, M., Orford J., & Weishaar, H. (2018). systems thinking as a framework for analyzing commercial determinants of health. The Milbank Quarterly, 96, 472–498. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0009.12339
Standing, G. (2014). The Precariat. Contexts, 13(4), 10–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/1536504214558209
Cortinois, A. A., & Birn, A.-E. (2021). What’s Technology Got to Do With It? Power, Politics, and Health Equity Beyond Technological Triumphalism. Global Policy, 12(S6), 75–79. https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12982
Sekalala, S., Forman, L., Hodgson, T., Mulumba, M., Namyalo-Ganafa, H., & Meier, B. M. (2021). Decolonising human rights: how intellectual property laws result in unequal access to the COVID-19 vaccine. BMJ global health, 6(7), e006169. doi:10.1136/bmjgh-2021-006169
Barrett J. Commercial determinants of health and nursing research: Opportunities for advancement. Clinical Nursing Research. 2023;32(7):995-999. doi:10.1177/10547738231185243
Chimonas S, Mamoor M, Zimbalist S A, Barrow B, Bach P B, Korenstein D et al. (2021). Mapping conflict of interests: scoping review. BMJ, 375, e066576 doi:10.1136/bmj-2021-066576
Forman, L., Jackson, C., and Fajber, K.(2023).Can we move beyond vaccine apartheid? Examining the determinants of the COVID-19 vaccine gap. Global Public Health, 18(1), 1-18.
Miller FA, Young SB, Dobrow M & Shojania KG. Vulnerability of the medical product supply chain: the wake-up call of COVID-19. BMJ Quality and Safety, 30,331-335. DOI: 10.1136/bmjqs-2020-012133
Loewenson R, Godt S, Chanda-Kapata P. (2022). Asserting public health interest in acting on commercial determinants of health in sub-Saharan Africa: insights from a discourse analysis. BMJ Global Health, 7:e009271. https://gh.bmj.com/content/7/7/e009271.info
Eisenkraft Klein, D., Shawanda, A. (2023) Bridging the commercial determinants of Indigenous health and the legacies of colonization: A critical analysis. Global Health Promotion. doi: 10.1177/17579759231187614
Crocetti AC, Cubillo (Larrakia) B, Lock (Ngiyampaa) M, et al. (2022) The commercial determinants of Indigenous health and well-being: a systematic scoping review. BMJ Global Health, 7:e010366. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2022-010366