What Joseph Dumit calls "drugs for life" is our contemporary state of affairs wherein "the vast majority of illnesses today are treated as chronic and ... being at risk for illness is often treated as if one had a disease requiring lifelong treatments" (6). In anthropological fashion, Dumit explores this contemporary situation as a set of commonsense views that he hopes to make "strange" to the academic or everyday reader. Dumit offers a compelling and accessible analysis of a contemporary American, middle-class view of health. His ethnographic account addresses the troubling situation wherein pharmaceutical research is successfully conducted with the aim of getting more Americans on more pharmaceuticals for longer, with little or no research conducted on when to reduce or stop medication use. Dumit is clear that his project does not concern fraud or cover-ups in the pharmaceutical industry, crediting others with having done this work. Instead, his concern is the logic of risk reduction and profit maximization.
