Becoming a ‘pharmaceutical person’: Medication use trajectories from age 26 to 38 in a representative birth cohort from Dunedin, New Zealand

Despite the abundance of medications available for human consumption, and frequent concerns about increasing medicalization or pharmaceuticalization of everyday life, there is little research investigating medicines-use in young and middle-aged populations and discussing the implications of young people using increasing numbers of medicines and becoming pharmaceutical users over time. We use data from a New Zealand longitudinal study to examine changes in self-reported medication use by a complete birth cohort of young adults. Details of medications taken during the previous two weeks at age 38 are compared to similar data collected at ages 32 and 26, and by gender. Major drug categories are examined. General use profiles and medicine-types are considered in light of our interest in understanding the formation of the young and middle-aging ‘pharmaceutical person’ – where one’s embodied experience is frequently and normally mediated by pharmaceutical interventions having documented benefit/risk outcomes. •A novel cohort study showing medicine-use trajectories in young/middle-aging adults.•Focus on oral contraceptives, analgesics, nutritional supplements, antidepressants.•Consideration of competing accounts of use of these medicines in young/middle aged.•Benefit/risk profiles show medicine-use as highly consequential for public health.•Shows early life-course onset of “pharmaceutical personhood”.