Here are a few numbers that don't add up. Just-released stats from the FBI show that about three-quarters of a million Americans were arrested on marijuana charges last year—most of them for simple possession, as StoptheDrugWar.org reports. Meanwhile, a brand-new Huffington Post poll finds that nearly 60 percent of Americans want the weed legalized. Okay, you might expect such news from the liberal cabal at HuffPo, but their survey comes on the heels of a Gallup poll that declared 50 percent—the highest total ever—supported legalization. The gap between public policy and public ... Read More
750,000 Arrested for Marijuana – Though Most Americans Want It Legalized
November 1, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
The Bitterest Pill: Maybe China Isn’t Counterfeiting Drugs
August 3, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Are unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies in China and India really to blame for fake malaria pills showing up in Asia and Africa? Probably not. This past May, the prestigious medical journal The Lancet published findings that 30 percent of 1,700 malaria pills tested in Southeast Asia and West Africa didn’t work. In one-in-three cases, a box labeled as treatment for the mosquito-borne plague actually contained pills made with inert chemicals, expired active ingredients, or ingredients cut to stretch one pill into several—enough to fill the box, each scantly more medicinal than an ... Read More
New Statin Warnings Include Brain-Related Effects
February 29, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Since 2009, Miller-McCune has taken a couple bites of the apple surrounding statins – a class of drugs used to lower cholesterol in the bloodstream – and whether there might be some unacknowledged health concerns for some users. Just about anything a human might ingest, from aspirin to water, might prove harmful in some cases, but we looked at statins because they were so popular (in 2009, we estimated 13 million in the U.S. alone were prescribed statins, and that figure is now believed to be north of 20 million) and yet there was little discussion of the drugs’ risks. And there are ... Read More
Do You Know Where Your Medicine Came From?
January 6, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Headaches. Insomnia. Anxiety. American medicine cabinets are packed with remedies for these common maladies. And up to 40 percent of them are manufactured overseas (along with 80 percent of active ingredients for pharmaceuticals). But a recent report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated that in fiscal year 2009, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration visited just 11 percent of the 3,765 foreign factories it is responsible for inspecting — compared to 40 percent of domestic factories. In 2008, the GAO found that the FDA took two to five years to follow up with foreign plants ... Read More
Ritalin Can Wake the Brain From Anesthesia
September 21, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Anesthesia is one of the most common surgical practices, and also one of the most mysterious. In the operating room, doctors have no reliable tools to reverse anesthesia once it starts, because no one understands the neurological mechanisms that switch on consciousness. The only way to pull a patient out of anesthesia is to let the drugs dissipate from the body. Now, a new study shows that Ritalin — the same drug used to treat attention deficit disorder in children — has the power to wake the brain from general anesthesia. The study, which will appear in the October issue of ... Read More
Statins, Lou Gehrig and Big Questions
January 20, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Dr. Greg Burns (not his real name) is a 72-year-old retired radiologist living in Connecticut. Until early last year, he ran with his dog at canine agility meets, skied, ice skated and played 18 holes of golf. He is now unable to walk and is taking a course of medication that will postpone, by a few months, his death. Burns' rapid decline began in December 2007 when he suffered a short-acting stroke from which he fully recovered. His cholesterol level was elevated and so as a preventative measure his doctor prescribed a 20mg daily dose of Crestor, a cholesterol-lowering drug in the ... Read More
Warnings About Statins Grow Louder
January 19, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Statins have been marketed — and widely described in the media — as wonder drugs which help ensure heart health by lowering cholesterol. But as we reported in 2009 ("Cholesterol Contrarians Question Cult of Statins"), an outspoken group of researchers warn their use is too widespread, and their potential dangers underestimated. A study just published in the journal The Cochrane Collaboration suggests their doubts are valid. Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine reviewed previous studies on the risks and benefits of statins for people at low risk of ... Read More
A Scientist and Ewe Walk Into a Bar …
April 16, 2010 • By • 1 Comment
Did you hear the joke about the pregnant female sheep that took Viagra? Um, no, really — it was in the Journal of Nutrition and everything. Back in 2003, two Texas AgriLife Research scientists were laughingly chatting about Viagra while working with pregnant ewes — look, things can get slow on the Frontiers of Science, OK? "We made a joke that many men are now using Viagra and that women may also have a need for it," recalled Dr. Guoyao Wu in a press release, as a rim-shot echoed in the background. "Interestingly, one week later, we saw that Pfizer Inc. announced an international ... Read More
Jackson Case Highlights Medical Ethics
July 22, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
The King of Pop and the World's Greatest Womanizer have more in common than you might think. Michael Jackson's death last month, like that of Howard Hughes in 1976, revealed the hidden side of a famously reclusive figure, one that involved elaborate schemes to obtain prescription drugs. Both men began a regiment of painkillers after an accident: Hughes' plane crash in 1946 and Jackson's burn on the set of a Pepsi commercial in 1984. Over time, each developed a tolerance for narcotics that enabled them to consume otherwise lethal doses. What followed the death of Hughes, like many others ... Read More
A New Drug to Fight Portal Hypertension?
April 2, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
Although portal hypertension, the most significant complication for patients with liver cirrhosis, can become life-threatening, doctors do not have many effective treatment options available to them. A new study in the April issue of Hepatology, however, suggests the drug sorafenib — already approved in several countries for treatment of kidney and liver cancer — dramatically improves the health of rats with the condition. In the experiment, rats took sorafenib orally every day for two weeks and displayed no adverse effects from the treatment. The drug is designed to inhibit the ... Read More
