If you watched this year’s Super Bowl commercials, the offbeat ad showing a man envying the rest of the world (dogs included) their bowel movements may have registered as nothing worse than a case of TMI.
New guidelines issued by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration urge pharmaceutical manufacturers to adapt new methods of preventing or deterring the product tampering that helps facilitate prescription opioid misuse, abuse and addiction.
Not all teen prescription drug abuse prevention programs are created equal, as researchers from Duke University and Pennsylvania State University discovered during a recent study.
Researchers and addiction specialists are well aware that people affected by physical dependence and drug addiction commonly have a susceptibility to certain social and environmental cues that make ongoing substance use and relapses during substance treatment more likely. However, fairly little is known about the specific drug cues that motivate people physically dependent on prescription…
Do drug companies have your doctor on the payroll? More than half a million American doctors and nearly 1,360 teaching hospitals were paid $3.5 billion over five months last year by pharmaceutical and medical device companies, a new federal website has revealed. Some of the companies are among the bigger makers of prescription opiates that…
A prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP) is an official database of information on prescribers and recipients of controlled substances. The idea is that when doctors and pharmacists can see exactly who is obtaining prescription drugs, the public’s ability to abuse those drugs will be minimized. The database is also open to law enforcement. A recent…
The National Football League has been sued by more than 600 retired players, who have charged that they were wrongfully doped with addictive painkillers to keep them on the field at the expense of their health. This marks the second time in a week that makers of opiate drugs have been pulled into lawsuits. On…
The district attorneys of two California counties have sued five giant pharmaceutical companies, charging that they fraudulently marketed highly addictive drugs meant for terminal cancer patients as safe for chronic pain relief. The resulting explosion in prescription painkillers, the plaintiffs allege, has contributed to the nation’s alarming spike in opiate overdose deaths.
A new report from the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) should serve as a wake-up call to consumers searching for and buying their medications online. Illegal online drug sellers are the most frequent conduits of counterfeit drugs and pose a continued threat to global public health, the report titled Internet Drug Outlet Identification…
A study from the University of Warwick Medical School in Coventry, England, has linked certain anxiolytic (anti-anxiety) and hypnotic (sleeping) drugs with an increased risk of early death. The study was published in the British journal BMJ.