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This paper recounts the tale of a 'Spurious Drugs Kingpin' and his scandalous business empire of relabelling and recirculating expired medicines in the south Indian city of Chennai. At the time the story broke, in the first half of 2010, questions of drug safety dominated media headlines and public discussion. However, a closer investigation suggests a more complicated picture. While relabelling expired medicines was certainly a crime, it is far from clear if their relabelling and subsequent redistribution constituted a public health danger. If actually existing unsafe drugs did not fuel this drug safety scandal, what did? I argue this case illuminates two things: (1) the illusory nature of certainties about drug safety and (2) how ambiguity about the safety of expired drugs facilitates policing not of relations within the pharmacological world, but instead of social and economic relations. This episode matters because it illuminates how, within apparent attempts to police the safety of circulation of drugs, drugs themselves are neither subject nor object, but instead the ground upon which market battles are waged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The illegal trade in wildlife is a serious threat to the existence of wild animals throughout the world. The short supply and high demand for wildlife articles have caused an influx of many different forms of fake wildlife articles into this trade. The task of identifying the materials used in making such articles poses challenges in wildlife forensics as different approaches are required for species identification. Claws constitute 3.8% of the illegal animal parts (n=2899) received at the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) for species identification. We describe the identification of seized suspected tiger claws (n=18) using a combined approach of morphometric and DNA-based analysis. The differential keratin density, determined using X-ray radiographs, indicated that none of the 18 claws were of any large cat but were fake. We determined three claw measurements, viz. ac (from the external coronary dermo-epidermal interface to the epidermis of the skin fold connecting the palmar flanges of the coronary horn), bc (from the claw tip to the epidermis of the skin fold connecting the palmar flanges of the coronary horn) and the ratio bc/ac, for all the seized (n=18), tiger (n=23) and leopard (n=49) claws. Univariate and multivariate statistical analyses were performed using SPSS. A scatter plot generated using canonical discriminant function analysis revealed that of the 18 seized claws, 14 claws formed a cluster separate from the clusters of the tiger and leopard claws, whereas the remaining four claws were within the leopard cluster. Because a discrepancy was observed between the X-ray images and the measurements of these four claws, one of the claw that clustered with the leopard claws was chosen randomly and DNA analysis carried out using the cyt b (137bp) and 16S rRNA (410bp) genes. A BLAST search and comparison with the reference database at WII indicated that the keratin material of the claw was derived from Bos taurus (cattle). This is a pioneering discovery, and we suggest that a hierarchical combination of techniques be used for identifying claws involved in wildlife offences, i.e. that an X-ray, morphometric and DNA-based analysis be carried out, to ascertain whether the claws are of tigers or leopards. To identify species in the illegal wildlife trade morphometric and genetic reference database should be developed. Morphological features as well as DNA profiles need to be used for better implementation of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972 of India and other laws/treaties in South-east Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]