Drugs | featured news

A big fat tip or tainted drug money? Struggling Minnesota waitress Stacy Knutson said it was the former; Moorhead, Minn., police apparently believed it was the latter.

Sales of the nation's two most popular prescription painkillers have exploded in new parts of the country, an Associated Press analysis shows, worrying experts who say the push to relieve patients' suffering is spawning an addiction epidemic....

Officials at drugmaker Merck & Co. say they will take more time to decide what to do about an experimental blood thinner that gave disappointing results in a second big study....

Watson Pharmaceuticals Inc is close to buying Swiss-based Actavis for around $7 billion, marking the latest deal between generics companies racing to achieve economies of scale, three sources familiar with the matter said.

Prescription sleep medications, also called hypnotics, rank among the most-advertised and most-prescribed drugs in the United States. Might these pills be doing more than helping people get a good night’s sleep?

Police arrested 17 Texas Christian University students, including four football players, today on drug charges on and around the campus after a six-month investigation, The Daily Skiff reports.

U.S. troops are increasingly using an easy-to-get herbal mix called "Spice," which mimics a marijuana high and can bring on hallucinations that last for days. The abuse of the drug has so alarmed military officials that they've launched an aggressive testing program that this year has led to the investigation of more than 1,100 suspected users, according to military figures.

The emergency contraceptive Plan B will not be made available over-the-counter to younger teens, the Food and Drug Administration announced today, exposing a rift between the agency and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

If you want the FDA to approve more innovative, new drugs based on promising but early clinical results, you have to give the FDA a way to revoke those approvals later on, should larger trials prove that those drugs aren't as safe or effective as they first seemed. This is why the FDA should be congratulated for the way it has handled the Avastin breast cancer saga, and why I hope we will see the FDA handle more cases like this one, not less.

The settlement is the largest yet in a wave of cases brought against pharmaceutical companies for illegal marketing of drugs.