A new study from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health shows a positive link between the amount of the hypnotic (sleeping medicine) zopiclone in the blood and the chance of being assessed as impaired in a clinical examination. The study also included drivers who only showed alcohol in their blood test.

Statin prescription varies across geographic locations in Australia, demonstrating inequalities in healthcare.

A newly identified molecular pathway that directs stem cells to produce glial cells yields insights into the neurobiology of Down's syndrome and a number of central nervous system disorders characterized by too many glial cells, according to a recent study by researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

Anna Nicole Smith's boyfriend / lawyer Howard K. Stern (no, not that Howard Stern) as well as two doctors, Dr. Sandeep Kapoor and Dr. Khristine Eroshevich have been charged with conspiracy to provide the former Playboy Playmate with thousands of prescription pills before her 2007 fatal overdose.

John C. Odom, a minor-league pitcher who became famous last year after being traded, not for another player, but for 10 bats worth $665, has died of a drug overdose, one that only surfaced today, months after its occurrence.

Since early last week officials close to the Obama administration have indicated that Gil Kerlikowske will be named as the nation’s next drug czar. What they didn’t mention was the paradigm shift that this could provoke in U.S. drug policy.

More than 90 percent of Americans age 65 and older have prescription drug coverage today, compared to 76 percent who were covered in 2004, according to a University of Michigan analysis. And poor seniors are just as likely to have coverage as the rich.

Drugs are regularly prescribed to children in outpatient care that have not been licensed for children. The pharmacologist Bernd Mühlbauer and his colleagues present the result of their health services analysis in the new edition of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International.

Melbourne, Australia, — 19 January 2009 — Australia’s leading scientific journal in the substance use area, the Drug and Alcohol Review – published by Wiley-Blackwell, has released a special issue on the use of new technologies in the treatment of drug problems. The issue highlights the use of mobile phones, Internet and computers to treat drug use problems.

About 11 percent of the 4 million babies born in the U.S. each year have been exposed to alcohol or illicit drugs in the womb, according to a June 2006 report by the National Center on Substance Abuse and Child Welfare.

At least one in 25 older adults, about 2.2 million people in the United States, take multiple drugs in combinations that can produce a harmful drug-drug interaction, and half of these interactions involve a non-prescription medication, researchers from the University of Chicago Medical Center report in the Dec. 24/31, 2008, issue of JAMA.

In this ongoing quest, a group of Scripps Research Institute scientists, along with colleagues from the University of California, San Diego, (UCSD) have borrowed from physics to deliver one of those research rarities—an unmitigated success. The group has devised a computational method that, with remarkable accuracy, predicts how bacterial proteins fold and interact.