| With a view of everyday talk as constituted by and constitutive of the social world, this thesis examines the tensions that arise in everyday talk about prescription drugs. Rather than regard talk about drugs as a resource for understanding the factors that cause noncompliant behaviour, the author examines talk in social interaction as topic. In accounts of prescription drugs, speakers perform their identities as persons unwilling to give into drugs while simultaneously in need of drugs. The author also shows how speakers make dilemmas of autonomy and control relevant while they negotiate identities as self-governing individuals dependent on medical expertise. By mobilizing historically contingent socio-cultural resources, speakers use various strategies in social interaction to perform positive identities as responsible drug takers. In doing so, drug takers make those same discourses available for further identity work of themselves or others and in doing so re-circulate and substantiate the discursive world of prescription drugs. |
