Doctors are making it tougher to get prescription opioids, but cartels are still making big profits. By Jeanna Smialek.

Canada’s government has made it easier to open supervised drug injection sites across the country, offering communities a lifeline as they battle an opioid crisis that has claimed thousands of lives in recent years. New legislation passed this week streamlines the more than two dozen requirements previously needed to launch these facilities, which offer a medically supervised space and sterile equipment for people who use drugs intravenously.

Police in Ohio say the 5-year-old son of a couple who overdosed on heroin saved his parents by walking two blocks in the dark to alert another relative because he thought they were dead. Emergency responders used a drug-overdose antidote to revive the unresponsive pair Thursday morning after finding them on the floor of a home in Middletown, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) north of Cincinnati. A 3-month-old baby was found in a car seat nearby.

A Spirit Airlines pilot and his wife were found dead in their southwestern Ohio home Thursday. Authorities are still investigating but have said the deaths appear to be drug-related. Brian J. Halye, 36, a pilot with Spirit Airlines and his wife, 34-year-old Courtney A. Halye, were found dead in a bedroom of their home by their children, officials said.

Amid calls for faster reviews, researchers look for ways to catch dangerous drugs.

Stars in question have included Elvis, Truman Capote, Michael Jackson, and Marilyn Monroe.

The drug war in Mexico was ranked 2016's second deadliest conflict in the world, with only the war in Syria being labelled worse, a new annual survey has revealed. This means Mexico experienced levels of violence far more extreme than that of Iraq, Yemen or Afghanistan. As the war against Isis in Iraq, the civil war in Syria, and the conflict between the forces of Yemeni President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi and the Houthi rebels made the headlines, violence in Mexico has gone relatively underreported.

Police in Vancouver shared an alarming photograph showing what appears to be a pigeon’s egg nest constructed out of hypodermic needles. By Jessa Schroeder.

The disappearance of manufacturing and the rise of opioid abuse has hit men in the Rust Belt hard. That’s meant women are left to pick up the pieces. By Alana Semuels.

The earliest pill emerged in ancient Egypt as a little round ball containing medicinal ingredients. For the next 5000 years color was almost non-existent. Does color really matter? Aside from the obvious fact that pills are more attractive to the eye, color has indeed benefited consumers as well as the pharmaceutical companies in several very functional ways.

In addition to relieving headaches and preventing heart attacks, the drug seems to keep malignant cells from spreading.

As many as 300,000 victims of Mexico's drug war could be hidden in fosas clandestinas.

Flakka was believed to be behind two cannibalistic attacks in Florida that left one man blind and a married couple dead. It wasn't so. Here‘s why we need facts, not myths, about dangerous drugs. By Joseph Palamar. (Nov. 28, 2016)

Scientific evidence of a ‘higher’ state of consciousness has been found in a study led by the University of Sussex.

Almost one-third of new drugs approved by U.S. regulators over a decade ended up years later with warnings about unexpected — sometimes life-threatening — side effects or complications, according to a new analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. Researchers looked at potential problems that cropped up during the routine monitoring that's done once a medicine has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration and is on the market. The results, published Tuesday, covered all 222 prescription drugs approved by the FDA from 2001 through 2010.

And not the kind you’re thinking of. By Christina Stiehl.

The black flags of Isis have become the latest symbols of Islamic extremism. Their savagery has come to represent what we believe to be a vulgar distortion of an Abrahamic faith. We’ve grown exhausted in our infuriation at the commitment of these people to sadistic interpretations of scripture, supposedly leading them through beheadings and slaughter, all the way to paradise.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers seized nearly $1 million in smuggled drugs at the U.S-Mexico border crossing in Nogales last week, officials said Monday. Border agents arrested five U.S. citizens and two Mexican nationals in separate attempts to smuggle drugs into the United States from Mexico. They involved 412 pounds of methamphetamine, heroin and cocaine that was worth more than $919,000, the agency said in a media release. The seizures occurred over three days last week. CBP provided these details:

Picking up a quest abandoned by Big Pharma, academic labs are using new disruptive technology to develop contraceptive drugs for men.

Type 2 diabetes, although influenced by a person’s genes, is largely thought to be brought about by a poor diet and being overweight for prolonged periods of time, particularly at an old age. The pancreas is either unable to produce enough insulin, or the body’s cells simply don’t react to insulin, which leads to dangerously high blood sugar levels. This is known as insulin resistance, and at present, there is no medical way to treat this. A new drug forged by a team at the University of California, however, might prove to be a veritable game-changer.

What would you do if your child was a heroin addict suffering from acute withdrawal symptoms?

Carfentanil's a highly potent opioid. It is blamed for hundreds of lethal overdoses. Much of it reaches the U.S. from China, via the U.S. Postal Service. Now, China's announced a ban on the substance.

DCU's SeshSafe project is now providing students with drug-testing kits and information on drug safety, to check illegal drugs in an experiment seeking to reduce risks from adulterated substances. SeshSafe is the brainchild of DCU student and chairperson of the university's Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) group, Eleanor Hulm. After the deaths of three people in Cork and Dublin last year after drug use at parties, Ms Hulm took the initiative to provide a safe drug-testing kit to students in various Irish universities.

It comes as no surprise that cancer drugs cost a lot. Some years ago, researchers even coined the term “financial toxicity” to describe the distress caused by cancer prices. Now, a new study shows that the prices for the top 10 cancer drugs are 42 percent higher in the U.S. than they are in the United Kingdom. No one benefits from this upward spiral except drug companies.

Texas officials filed a federal lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration Tuesday following a 17-month stand-off with the agency over the legality of imported drugs the state intended to use for lethal injections. In July of 2015, Texas imported 1,000 vials of thiopental sodium, a barbiturate anesthetic that ensures rapid loss of consciousness when given in lethal cocktails. According to the court documents (PDF), the drugs came from an unnamed “foreign distributor." (However, Buzzfeed has reported they were from a questionable source in India.)

In Iceland, teenage smoking, drinking and drug use have been radically cut in the past 20 years. Why won’t other countries follow suit?

I was a slutty and self-loathing downtown party girl fellatrix rushing to ruin. By Cat Marnell.

Back pain is an ailment most of us will suffer at some point in our lives. But while we might be tempted to reach for a pack of aspirin, new research suggests we might be better off downing a sugar pill.

Patient advocates are urging FDA and drug companies to set the bar higher.

Public relations nightmare strikes just when drug makers try cleaning their image.

Drug trial studies that are sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry are more likely to favour a sponsor's product.

A new way of developing painkillers has been discovered by researchers from Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. A team of scientists used computational simulation to analyze interactions at the cell’s docking sites for painkillers. These sites are called the opioid receptors. When their prototype of a morphine-like molecule was used in an animal model, it was able to produce substantial pain relief in inflamed tissues while healthy tissues remained unaffected. This suggests that the severe side effects currently associated with these types of painkillers could be avoided.

Inside the recording studio at Screwed Up Records & Tapes, William Gibbs lights up a Black & Mild and pauses to consider how long he’s been sipping. Next to Gibbs—who’s better known as Will-Lean, a member of the legendary Houston hip-hop collective Screwed Up Click—is a tall, white Styrofoam cup. The concoction inside mixes Faygo Redpop, a strawberry-flavored cream soda, and promethazine codeine cough syrup, a prescription pain...

Benzodiazepines are used by many people despite their associated risks and harms.