Actor-Network Theory and the Regulatory Governance of Nicotine in the UK: How Nicotine Gum Came to be a Medicine, but Not a Drug.

This paper will examine whether Actor-Network Theory (ANT) has the potential to be a useful tool for empirical socio-legal research. ANT was developed in Science and Technology Studies; however, its interest in understanding the relations between heterogeneous entities - paying attention to the role non-humans and technology play in society and focusing on the relations and interactions between actors - has wider applications, and it has been suggested that ANT may be used constructively in Socio-Legal Studies (Cloatre, 2008, Cowan and Carr, 2008). Here ANT will be deployed in a study of the evolution of divided regulatory responsibility for conventional tobacco products and for Nicotine Replacement Therapies (NRTs) in the UK, particularly how NRTs came to be regulated as pharmaceuticals. This paper focuses on the regulatory decisions taken in the UK in respect of the first NRT: a nicotine-containing gum developed in Sweden. This gum, as Nicorette, became available in the United Kingdom in 1980 as a prescription only medicine under the 1968 Medicines Act. It is proposed that utilising ANT to explore the development of nicotine gum and the regulatory decisions taken about it in the UK, will place these decisions into the wider context of ideas about tobacco control and addiction, and help to better understand how different substances such as tobacco, nicotine and nicotine gum were conceptualised, leading to very different systems of regulation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]