Photojournalism of the Spurious Drug Bust: Key Shots

The Force of Spurious Drug Bust Photojournalism: Thinking with Visual Culture

Visual culture helps unpack how photographs come to possess dynamic, real-world functions, beyond simply showing the viewer ‘what happened’ (Edwards 2001). It also excels at intertextual analysis. Intertextual analysis is how visual anthropologists read the relations that connect different, if related, sets of images. The visual trope of the spurious drug bust photojournalism conveys a clear message: the police are hard at work, ensuring public safety by tackling the urgent, life-threatening danger of fake drugs in India's pharmaceutical supply and distribution chains. But how does this message land so forcefully, such that, as readers, it feels as though we do not even need to read the story because we already know what it will tell us?

The study of visual culture thus helps us get to grips with what gives images their charge. It offers techniques for surfacing the labour that we, as viewers, perform to infer a bigger picture of meaning from limited information in an image's formal content. If an image is only a snapshot, as viewers we fill in the gaps to make sense out of it. We do this by situating images within broader structures of meaning, often primarily with other sets of images. Photographs are thus enmeshed in broader modes of cultural process and power than a strictly formal analysis of their content can reveal (Sontag 1977). Considering the spurious drug bust as a piece of visual rhetoric is a way to pay close attention to the interlinked narratives and forms of persuasion that these images afford (McLagan and McKee 2012; Rampley 2005). To anticipate my argument somewhat, spurious drug bust photojournalism gains force precisely because its images are distinct yet recognisable. They feed off, inform, and indeed talk to other images. In what follows, I show how the photojournalistic trope of the spurious drug bust combines the messaging and charge of two otherwise well-established sets of visual forms: that of the global war on drugs, and that of public health campaigns.

The Force of the Spurious Drug Bust Photojournalism: Thinking with Fake-Talk

Why does the story of the Indian police protecting the public from the urgent danger of spurious drugs work so well as visual story? Is it just a case of sensationalism, from the narrative frisson of narcotics drug bust photojournalism and the affective authority of ambient public health information announcements? Or is there something about the story of policing spurious drugs in India that requires a visual spectacle to land with its audience?

To answer these questions, I bring the conceptual and methodological tool of fake-talk (Hornberger and Hodges 2023) into play with the visual-culture studies. Fake-talk deepens the insights of studies of visual culture for understanding photojournalism. If visual culture reminds us that photographs make claims about truth, rather than offer transparent representations thereof, then fake-talk elaborates on this insight. This is because fake-talk invites us to work critically with a particular kind of claim: claims about fakeness.

As Julia Hornberger and I have argued, claims about fakeness have qualities that set them apart and give them power. Among these qualities, of particular interest to me here is how these claims thrive on the performance, rather than presentation, of evidence. We refer to this particular performative power of fake-talk as its ‘evidentiality’ (Hornberger and Hodges this volume; Hornberger et al. 2023). Spurious drug bust photojournalism delivers an effective form of such evidentiality; visual fake-talk empowers the story of policing spurious drugs in India. The rubric of fake-talk side-steps questions about the ontology of fake pharmaceuticals, focusing rather on what claims about fakeness cause to happen. Bringing the conceptual and methodological frames of visual culture and fake-talk to bear on each other, I reflect on the discursive success of this trope, paying particular attention to what this form of visual fake-talk illuminates and what it occludes. The visual language of the spurious drug bust draws force not only from its own subject-matter, but also through its recursive relations with other sets of images.

I have examined the inter-referentiality of images and how this delivered meaning and charge to spurious drug bust photojournalism. Here I argue analogously about the inter-referentiality of social and political contexts, paying attention to the import of the unsteady reputations in India both of policing and of fakes. Both lie beyond the frame but also animate what lies within it. The success of the spurious drug bust's visual fake-talk lies in its ability to stabilise these unsteady reputations.

Let us go back to the ‘back at the station’ shot of spurious drug bust photojournalism, above. As I mentioned in the introduction, when I returned to these particular images for this article, I realised that although the police were prominently positioned, in the photograph they were actually outnumbered by the media. This is not just evidence of police using a photocall to draw attention to their work, or evidence that members of the press, including many photographers and videographers, had attended. The police were active in creating a certain story that consolidated their reputations as guardians of the public and drew attention to their unambiguous heroics. Why would such labour be required of the police? Surely this is obvious as part of their role?

As Keith Hayward (2010: 3) reminds us, policing images are expressive. They are not simply images of how things are but also of how police wish to be seen. For police, these images’ otherwise straightforward messaging does additional work. Indian police are seen by their public not as even-handed, reliable arbiters, or as deliverers of law, order, or justice within formal legal structures. Instead, they are seen as doing the bidding of those in power at the expense of those who are not (Jauregui 2016).

Perhaps the most extreme example of such unaccountable policing power in the Indian media is coverage of the ‘encounter killing’ (also known as ‘encounter death’, ‘extrajudicial killing’, or simply ‘encounter’). While these often appear to be state-sponsored assassinations, there is a range of public opinion about them, from enthusiasm for summary justice, to tacit support, to simple resignation (Jauregui 2016: 92–93). It is also worth noting that photographs regularly accompany media stories of encounter deaths, and that these photographs typically share formal qualities with those of the spurious drug bust. They feature uniformed police standing over corpses laid out in the foreground.

Police violence is also a standard theme in Indian literature, film, and television, from pulp fiction to Cannes submissions. The award-winning film Visaranai (Interrogation), adapted from a Tamil novel, followed the story of an autorickshaw driver, mistakenly caught up in others’ arrests, who experienced extreme police violence. Its Indian premier caused a stir when a senior bureaucrat with a reputation as an anti-corruption crusader was reported to have endorsed the film's graphic portrayal of corrupt and violent police extracting forced custodial confessions. In response, other officials dismissed the film as ‘an outright affront on the entire police force’ (Sivan 2016).

This theme and the controversy it can cause matters for spurious drugs bust photojournalism because the spurious drug bust tells a different, unambiguous, uncontroversial story about the police. The spurious drug bust sidelines the untrustworthiness of the police and provides a redeeming narrative of heroism. The visual spectacle of policing fakes creates an opportunity for police to stage their own redemption for their public.

Just as the reputation of Indian police is far from straightforward, so is the reputation in India of fake drugs in particular and counterfeit goods in general. The reputation of fakes in India swings between acceptance of the decades-long ubiquity of the fake-everything in India when it comes to consumer items (from food to mobile phones) to a well-rehearsed critique of fake-talk as a symptom of global IP regimes’ unjust exclusion of Indian manufacturing from the circle of global economic power.

India's reputation as home to fake-everything is common among nations of the Global South (Abbas 2008; Wong 2013). Contemporary Indians are practised at understanding the immediate landscape of retail possibilities, as being so awash with fakes, and forms of the fake so many, that discerning between the good-enough fake and the authentic-or-original may not be worth the energy. The specificity of this global story for India lies in the manufacturing story-arc of its recent past. In post-Independence decades, popular pride and national policy advanced domestic industrial manufacture and self-sufficiency, including pharmaceutical self-sufficiency through the manufacture of reverse-engineered low-cost and effective generic drugs. In the wake of India's pivot in the 1990s to economic liberalisation and globalisation, however, this has been supplanted by an import-culture.

Whereas fake-everything can be a story of India's participation in its own indignity, the widespread critique of fake-talk is a critical disposition towards such claims about fakeness, particularly in the case of pharmaceutical manufacturing. Take the case of India's supply of reverse-engineered generic AIDS medication to South Africa. This put India and South Africa in contravention of the TRIPS agreement to which they had both recently signed up. However, many argued this IP regime put pharmaceutical manufacturers’ profits ahead of patient well-being and that, in public health emergencies, generic medication should be exempted from IP agreements. Since then, the global IP order's regular media campaigns, public-service style announcements, conferences, and eye-catching graphics, have branded India as purveyor of low-cost and, most notably, low-quality copies. This turns on an important conflation between the violation of copyright and the safety of the products. India's massive generic-medicines industry might include manufacturing that contravenes international agreements, but drug safety and patent violation are far from the same threat to public health (Hornberger 2018; Thakur 2023).

The upshot of this recent history is that, by the opening of the twenty-first century, the fruits of Indian manufacture, including medicine, afforded two different narratives with very different meanings. Indian pharmaceutical and other goods could be seen simultaneously as amulets of autarky and as suspect, second-rate, shoddy, or just plain dangerous.

India has one of the world's highest per-capita newspaper readerships (Jeffrey 2000), and stories about spurious drugs took up much daily ink in India's broadsheet press. Readers of such reports in 2010 would have been familiar with Chennai's reputation as healthcare hub as well as of extensive coverage of TRIPS, Indian generics, and AIDS drugs. They would also have been familiar with other legal cases and campaigns for access to life-saving drugs—including some filed with the Chennai High Court—that continued to fight battles around patents and generics into the 2010s (Banerjee 2017; Sunder Rajan 2017: 112–156). Indian pharma appeared in those stories as the plucky underdog in a battle against an unjust global IP regime, or as bandit-heroes stealing medicines from the WTO and redistributing them to the poor. But these newspapers also covered accusations that Indian manufacturing and regulatory compliance cut corners in pursuit of profit, particularly as levelled by the all-powerful US Food and Drug Administration alongside journalists’ and high-profile whistleblowers’ court cases (Eban 2019).

These multi-scalar environments, and the reputations of Indian pharmaceuticals that circulate in them, matter for making sense of spurious drug busts. They matter because they connect, conflate, and collapse the difference and distance between the international political economy of Indian pharmaceuticals and the localised press coverage of busts.

By thinking with visual fake-talk, it is possible to surface the labour required to hold together instabilities at the heart of policing fakes. This visual trope does not just deliver the message that police protect the public from fake drugs. It works by performing an evidentiality that stabilises the fake, valorises the police, and materialises the problem of fake drugs as self-evident and urgent.

That performative stabilisation is important because, outside the frame of the image in spurious drug bust photojournalism, fake drugs are hard to find. Journalists spill much ink on the problem of spurious drugs in India, but they have also noted the mismatch between the policing of this problem and the near-complete absence of spurious-drugs cases heard all the way to court (Perappadan 2019). This was also the case in Chennai in 2010: no one was brought to book (Hodges 2019). When Emma Garnett and I went through the expert literature on the problem of fake drugs in global health research, we were likewise unprepared for how hard it was to find any strong evidence that the problem is as widespread as suggested (Hodges and Garnett 2020).

When leafing through my clippings to think through what the policing of fakes is and does, I found myself lingering over images I had collected as part of this 2010 story but not done much with as yet. Previously it had seemed clear to me that the spectacle of the spurious drug bust allowed the police to big themselves up and for photojournalists to help them spread the message that the public should be ever vigilant against the urgent danger of fake drugs. On looking at these photos again, what now became apparent was that they were pictures of fakes materialising themselves before my own eyes. What I had clipped out constituted yet another chapter to the visual apparatus of the story of policing fake pharmaceuticals in India.

What I was looking at in this case were press images of piles of dumped garbage: an unglamorous other to the image of the spurious drug bust and its preening police. These photos showed a large pile of medicine strips scattered on the ground, mixed with dry leaves and debris. Many of the medicine strips appeared unopened, with visible white capsules or tablets still intact in their packaging. This additional chapter of fly-tipping was represented by news items featuring images of piles of medicines that the accompanying stories described as having been dumped at the edge of the city under cover of darkness. These images punctuated the overall media coverage and added a twist to the tale (for example, Express News Service 2010b; Staff Reporter 2010).

In the text for these stories about dumped pharmaceuticals, the power of accusation weighed heavily on retail pharmacists. The text explains they did not believe their own wares to be free of taint and had not anticipated the spree of potentially heavy-handed police actions on the prowl for fake drugs. They thus took the option of loss over that of risk, shedding (possibly completely legal) collections of expired drugs. Here, in the coming together of policing and fake-talk, there is no possibility of redress for a suspect. If there are no fakes, how does a merchant prove that their fake is actually real? As we have written elsewhere (Hornberger et al. 2023), fake-talk opens up space for the performance of evidentiality. The power of fake-talk is such that it evades critiques premised on standards of fact-based evidence and assessment.

What these images also show is how the policing of fakes proliferates forms of policing. In this instance, merchants police themselves. Merchants felt under threat by the widespread coverage of the spurious drugs bust story and by the saturation of the message: law and order will find you. These photographs did not just materialise fakes. Through dumping so too did the audience for visual fake-talk materialise itself. In turn, these images of piles of dumped goods were captured by the media and framed as this audience's extrajudicial confession. In the spectacle of the spurious drug bust, evidentiality bears the force of fakeness. It produces its own truth, even if an ungrounded one.

Stabilising the presence of the fake through evidential performances, the spectacle of the spurious drug bust also materialises spurious goods in plain sight. Policing often makes fakes in discourse and affect, as other contributions to this special issue show. What I show here in addition is that the visual fake-talk of policing fakes can literally materialise them. Photographs of raids produce the self-surfacing of the material thing itself, albeit in other photographs. Whereas the court record shows how seldom police succeed in really unveiling fake drugs, despite their spectacular announcements for the press, retailers do that work for them through apparently confessional self-policing.

Conclusion

I began this article by telling how I came to realise that spurious drug bust photojournalism constituted a visual trope. I showed that this mattered because a visual trope does more than simply document an event. The image becomes a symbol, a representation of a broader concept or way of storytelling. In this case, the visual trope of the spurious drug bust serves as a figurative snapshot, linking policing and fakes together in a particular set of relations—including the story of police attending to the urgent danger. The image of the spurious drug bust is not just one instance of visual storytelling but also a broader convention of storytelling that fixes the relationships among events and institutions and produces particular meaning.

I then asked: how does this trope work? How do these images gain such force and singular meaning? I borrowed from critical studies of visual culture to understand how images gain meaning and force not only from what is contained within the frame of the picture but also from what lies beyond it. I looked at how the trope of the spurious drug draws force and form from other images, such as those from Indian anti-narcotic policing as well as from anti-counterfeit drugs public health campaign graphics.

Next, I built on my understanding of how the trope of the spurious drug bust image works to ask: what work does it do? Was there something about the story of policing spurious drugs here that benefitted from a visual spectacle to land emphatically, or over-perform its message? To answer this, I looked into what the Indian police might gain from participating in this spectacle, and what the idea of the spurious drug might gain from the persuasive form of the visual trope. I found that the visual trope of the spurious drug bust shows its viewer two things that are otherwise extremely difficult to discern: the unambiguous heroics of the Indian police, and the reality of fake pharmaceuticals in India. In short, the spectacle of the spurious drug bust succeeds in presenting a snapshot within an overall process of law enforcement. Its images successfully index an otherwise invisible whole—both of policing and of fakes.

So, whither fake-talk? Is there any other way to take seriously the truth of the image? Fake-talk allows us to take claims about fakeness seriously, even as it allows for some critical purchase on those claims. By engaging with the trope of the spurious drug bust as making claims about the world ‘as it really is’, fake-talk allows us to appreciate the labour required to sustain this picture. We can appreciate how the effect of India's spurious drug bust photojournalism is to make the fake real. This effect is not to be measured in judicial processes but in how the story becomes an event and goes on to produce still further events. The latter include alleged self-policing by pharmaceutical traders who responded to this coverage by taking to the edges of the city and dumping their own suspect goods—thereby materialising the fake, real or otherwise.

The regular repetition of the trope succeeds in sidelining doubts about the truth in India when it comes to fakes in general and to spurious drugs especially. That the spurious drug bust was able to overcome all this to materialise both fakes and fear is an extraordinary achievement. Photographs are powerful claims-making devices. Fake-talk also makes powerful claims. In visual tropes such as spurious drug bust coverage we see the coming together of these forces. Inference is what the visual form of fake-talk facilitates. As Samson Lim (2016: 109) argues, the power of such representations of policing ‘stems from the fact that it facilitates the acceptance of circumstantial evidence, of allowing guesses’.

What work does the image of the spurious drug bust do? If we consider the policing in ‘policing fakes’ not as an instrument through which policies are smoothly carried out, but as a force in its own right, then we can see how the spectacle of the spurious drug bust stages an intervention by the police that in turn performs the truth of the fake. The spectacle of the spurious drug bust, via its performance of evidentiality, presents fake drugs as a real threat, and positions the police as natural guardians against that.

Coda

This article is ultimately about the illusory nature of evidence. This matters for our understanding of policing fakes because of the fraught nature of the ‘truth’ of the fake drug. Not only is the claim that drugs are fake generally enough to conjure suspicion and effect the fake (or the absence of authenticity), there also is very thin evidence of fake drugs, even as claims abound. In this article I have been preoccupied with understanding the enunciatory or rhetorical work that visual fake-talk does, catalysed by police as bridging the gap between evidence and its absence. The charge of the picture stands in for the missing pharmacological evidence or analysis.

However, throughout this article, I have described images rather than presenting them. Why? It was never my intention. In an unanticipated turn of events, when I received a draft of the article from the copyeditor before it went into production, due to complex and eye-wateringly costly requirements of obtaining rights and permissions to reproduce images, I realised that I would not be able to use the actual images from the newspaper items that I had initially built this article around.

During these vexing and unsuccessful attempts at obtaining rights and permissions for the images, however, my tale of benighted clippings and their benighted images took another curious twist in a story that already had a long list of curious twists. When I was unable to find the digital versions of the images by searching for the title and date of the articles with which they appeared, I turned to the Google Lens search feature. And when I scanned the clipping image into Google Lens, I was shocked but ultimately not very surprised by what I stumbled onto.

I had already realised that the truth of the image was fraught given that many spurious drug bust articles did not actually even claim to represent the story in the text: many drug bust stories were accompanied by stock photos, and plainly labelled as such. However, I came to understand that this was simply one of variously distant relationships between image and text. In looking for the digital version of each of the clippings with Google Lens, I realised that the images that I had clipped out of the papers, and that bore markers that I recognised of specific places in Chennai or that pictured specific high-ranking Chennai police officers, had been redeployed by the newspaper in completely unrelated stories five or more years later.

Why end here? Because my brief sojourn into Google Lens reinforces two take-aways from what working with images showed me: the hyper-mediation of policing fakes, and the ephemeral if not actually illusory nature of the evidence that is claimed in the policing of fakes.