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Book Review: Kane Race, Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs

In Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs, Kane Race invites us into a more expansive understanding of contemporary discourses on proper drug use. As the title suggests, this invitation is animated by his intentionally disorienting and queerly informed consideration of pleasure. We are all, he reminds us, familiar with the notion of pleasure consuming medicine, through, for example, public health admonishments to avoid eating too much butter, salt, or sugar. There is, however, another kind of pleasure consuming medicine. ‘Lifestyle’ drugs – like Viagra and Prozac – point to the way subjects clearly take pleasure consuming medicine. When the pharmaceutical industry can have advertising budgets that exceed research budgets, questions about manufacturing illnesses necessarily emerge. Thus, on the heels of one mode of pleasure consuming medicine follows another, one in which medicine consumes the norms of pleasure as it produces a market. For Race, this complex connection between pleasure and medicine animates current discourses of proper drug use, girding entrenched distinctions between treatment and enhancement, between licit and illicit drugs. Rather than assess the veracity of these distinctions, Race uses their entrenchment to illustrate how these distinctions gloss over the way all medicine is, in effect, re-creational: drugs, he suggests, re-create the nature and capacities of ‘normal’ bodies. A provocative question emerges: if all drugs are exercises in re-creation, then which forms of recreation do we want to follow? Race begins answering this question by pointing to the State’s investment in the use of drugs. Unlike the bulk of welfare services, which have declined in the face of globalization, the State has actually increased its investment in drug use. Race circles this square by proposing that drug talk and policy stand out as striking examples of how citizenship is produced in the face of globalizing flows that erode what the nation and citizenship mean. At the heart of Race’s argument is a critical evaluation of two discourses on proper drug use – one focusing on patient compliance, the other on drug abuse/misuse – that have been taken up as tools for evaluating citizenship and personhood in neoliberal societies. For example, in Chapter 2 Race points to how changes in prescribing practices brought into existence the more or less compliant patient, one whose capacity to self-administer medicine became a problem that now requires attention. In Chapter 3 he explores the emergence of a second discourse of proper drug use situated in law. Here, Race suggests that efforts organized around this discourse coach into existence a forward-looking, future oriented, and calculating subject. 436527 HEA16510.1177/1363459312436527Book ReviewHealth 2012