Last night, I was reading up on general medical underwriting practices and came across a phrase that stopped me in my tracks.  Terminating a list of things tested for in paramedical lab exams was this item:

Drugs of abuse.

Really?  Is that a common usage?  Well, close to a million googlehits can’t be wrong, I guess.  The DEA and a number of other US and foreign drug-related government entities seem to be using it in their literature, so I suppose I’m just late to the party on this one.

But it feels so awkward to me.  Why? 

For one thing, there’s something very self-consciously constructed about it: the “plural of descriptor” template moved years ago into the realm of PC-parody.  (I’d google for examples, but that strikes me as hard to pull off—the only static part of the template is the word “of”.)  We proceeded from earnest usage of “People of Color” to, eventually, satirical references to “People of Ugliness” or “Burritos of Bean” and so on.

Maybe “drugs of abuse” came into regular use a while back.  That I just noticed it now hardly suggests that it just started cropping up.

I wish I was more familiar with the history of pro- and anti-drug rhetoric in the US; it seems like there’s a lot of meat here, but I don’t know enough to really dig in.

Side note: it’s interesting that we have “drugs of abuse” as a category for the things required for “drug abuse”.  Are you a drug abuser?  Do you engage in drug abuse?  Then you use drugs of abuse, natch. 

Are there other constructions like this, where “foos of bar” are the fuel for the activity described as “foo bar”?