Le marché informel du médicament à Madagascar : une revanche populaire

This work shows us, in an inductive way, how the informal drug market is a popular revenge. This notion of "popular revenge" is understood as a form of counter-power put in place by drug sellers, and whose practice is made sustainable by the popular demand for pharmaceutical drugs. The informal drug market, as an example of a popular economy initiative, embodies a phenomenon of counter-power whose strength is to propose an alternative to the pharmaceutical structural framework in place in Madagascar, considered by our interlocutors as failing and not adequate to the demands of users. This counter-power is organized around the drug as "merchandise" and puts its market value on its therapeutic value. On the one hand, the trade of this commodity offers to its sellers exercising within the informal sector the opportunity of an escape from the peasant condition and the invention of a new "living together", based on ancestral values: the fihavanana or the principle of unity which constitutes the keystone of the social relations in Madagascar, and the respect of tanindrazana, the ancestral lands. On the other hand, for users, the acquisition of "drug-goods", as permitted through the informal drug market and carried out outside the biomedical context of the medical consultation, is in line with usual spending patterns. (miniaturization of quantities purchased, purchase out of a relationship of advice, reference to a local business)