In the late 1990’s, a transition to less regulated direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical marketing in the United States paralleled an intensification of the federal anti-drug effort through Congress’s call for a media campaign directly targeting youth and parents. With other popular culture narratives, this advertising has deeply informed American cultural norms about drug use in the twenty-first century. The resulting tension between a pro-pharmaceutical drug market and anti-illicit drug criminal justice system represents broader social conflicts about drugs and health, user agency, substance efficacy, controlled use, and addiction. Through contemporary drug narratives, this talk will address questions of individual agency within a culture of medicalisation of substance use. It will explore how an emphasis on individual health and medical supervision to regulate our bodies have become effective discourses of social power that we internalise and practice–what Michel Foucault theorised as “technologies of the self.” Questions related to what Nancy Campbell calls “problem-solving and problem creating drugs” will be explored. Is there a difference between taking a drug to avoid depression and taking a drug to feel good? What are the bases for relevant critical distinctions with regard to licit and illicit substance use and consciousness? And can they be found within a medical model that strongly shapes cultural norms regarding drugs and psychoactive substances, especially in terms of how we conceptualise, discuss, regulate, and research them?