Many people wrongly assume that cannabis use during pregnancy is safe. Research is increasingly documenting a host of serious health harms from prenatal exposure to cannabis and other substances.
Drugs can interact with one another in ways that are harmful. A study finds that taking oxycodone with certain SSRIs can make an opioid overdose more likely.
Non-opioid directives allow patients to refuse opioids in all health care settings. For surgical procedures that require anesthesia, however, this may do more harm than good.
Fentanyl adulteration led to the replacement of heroin in the unregulated drug supply of British Columbia. Now that benzodiazepines are present in many opioids, are we headed towards a ‘new normal?’
While the COVID-19 pandemic raged on, the opioid epidemic got worse as drug overdose deaths soared. New research proposes a way to chemically modify opioids to reduce the risk of addiction.
The 2020 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine goes to the discoverers of the hepatitis C virus. There’s an effective cure but homelessness and the opioid epidemic are driving a surge in infections.
About 1 in 4 people prescribed an opioid for pain end up abusing it. New methods to reduce the need for opioids after surgery have been shown to work – and thus minimize the need for such drugs.
While critics accuse companies facing lots of lawsuits of using bankruptcy as a sort of ‘get of jail free card,’ the reality of the legal procedure is more complicated.
State governments are leading the charge against opioid makers over their role in the epidemic. A team of researchers at Penn State examined just how much the crisis has cost them.
OxyContin maker Purdue has reportedly been mulling a bankruptcy filling, just as the first of around 2,000 lawsuits against it prepares to go to trial.