Popular Pharmacy Project - Santiago de Chile

= The Pharmacies of the People, (in Recoleta, Santiago de Chile)

Description

Martin Arboleda:

"Presently, in the Chilean neighborhood of Recoleta, there is a network of popular pharmacies where one can acquire medicines at a low cost outside the oligopoly circuit of big pharmaceutical companies. According to Daniel Jadue, the mayor that designed and implemented this project, the Popular Pharmacy not only has practical consequences by expanding access to affordable medicine to the working-class. It is also “a cluster-bomb, triggering change at the level of the consciousness, the will, and the mood of the left.”[19] If we consider it strictly from the perspective of the present, the Popular Pharmacy may seem a modest and limited initiative. However, its technical form may very well hold the key to more radical and profound future reforms that could eventually reconfigure the way in which medicine is produced and commercialized. Since its launch in 2015, the model of the Popular Pharmacy has not only delivered 1,200,000 medicinal items to 24,000 users in Recoleta, but it has also been successfully replicated in more than 140 municipalities all over the country. More than an isolated case, the Recoleta municipality is part of an emerging municipal movement in which different rebel municipalities around the world have turned the metropolitan area into a laboratory to experiment with non-capitalist forms of markets and social relations."

(https://critup.net/translations/trajectories-of-a-radical-idea/)