ABSTRACT
The technical ease of reproduction and transmission of digital information appears as though it could instantiate a very egalitarian political economy of knowledge. This chapter describes the pharmaceutical industry's main mode of production of clinical knowledge and one of its central modes of distribution of that knowledge. It aims to apply some terms of traditional political economy to the production of knowledge about pharmaceuticals. Clinical trials can provide opportunities to sell drugs, because physician investigators can be enrolled. The clinical trials business is a resource extraction industry. Appropriate subjects are its limiting resource and, thus, it needs to know where and how to find them. Publication planning is a form of 'ghost management' of clinical research and publication when pharmaceutical companies and their agents control or shape multiple steps in the research, analysis, writing and publication of articles, in ways opaque to readers.
