Revisiting Generation Rx: Emerging Trends in Pharmaceutical Enhancement, Lifestyle Regulation, Self-medication, and Recreational Drug Use

This chapter extends of drug use among youth and emerging adults in North America and reiterate a call for ethnographies of pharmakon: substances that straddle the medicine-drug continuum used as resources in the everyday self-management of bodies, minds, moods, and identity in what some researchers have come to refer to as the regulation of chemical selves. It highlights anthropological research on a number of aspects of psychoactive drug (PPD) use in our original Generation Rx piece and since then a number of other studies have been published. The chapter addresses the need for research on substance use among youth for recreational and self-medication purposes in the time of COVID-19. Declines in alcohol use and binge drinking have been reported among subgroups of youth in several countries. Street vernacular for PPDs such as OxyContin and Ritalin speak to the reframing of the pharmaceuticals in recreational drug use contexts.