Rain did not hold back anyone in St. Louis looking to safely dispose of unwanted and expired medication. On April 27, a record 16,311 pounds of medication from the St. Louis metropolitan area was discarded as part of the St. Louis Medication Disposal Initiative.
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New, nationally projectable survey results released today by The Partnership at Drugfree.org and MetLife Foundation confirmed that one in four teens has misused or abused a prescription (Rx) drug at least once in their lifetime - a 33 percent increase over the past five years.
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On April 27, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration will be running a national drug take-back day. It is an opportunity for everyone to safely remove unwanted, unused, or expired medication from medicine cabinets.
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A new national public opinion poll commissioned by Research!America shows only 18% of respondents believe chronic pain is a major health problem, even though a majority of Americans (63%) say they know someone who experienced pain so severe that they sought prescription medicines to treat it.
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Scientists provided a glimpse today based on an analysis of a museum collection of patent medicines used in turn-of-the-century America.
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Three years ago, on a Friday afternoon, I received a frantic phone call from my mother. My active and healthy father was in the hospital with a suspected stroke. I immediately started driving to New Jersey, where they lived. I knew I had to be there to ensure that my dad would be safe. He had been taken to one of the most dangerous places in the world: a hospital. The story of my dad's three day stay in a major American teaching hospital is remarkably unremarkable (Ashish Jha, 4/5).
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Medicine honors its heroes in many ways. But sometimes high accolades can turn out to be highly embarrassing. Consider the annual award for lifetime achievement in preventing and controlling sexual infections, given since 1972 by the American Sexually Transmitted Diseases Association.
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Methadone treatment for opioid dependence remains widely unavailable behind bars in the United States, and many inmates are forced to discontinue this evidence-based therapy, which lessens painful withdrawal symptoms.
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Here's another reason why a healthy diet during pregnancy is critical to the future health of your children: New research published in the March 2013 issue of The FASEB Journal, suggests that pregnant mothers who consume junk food actually cause changes in the development of the opioid signaling pathway in the brains of their unborn children.
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Annual deaths related to heroin and morphine are continuing to drop significantly, falling from 41 per cent of total drug-related deaths in the UK in 2010 to 32 per cent in 2011. Meanwhile, deaths from 'legal highs' - some of which have now been banned - remained steady following a large increase in the previous year.
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The Institute of Medicine Wednesday urged a series regulatory changes to help protect the public against buying fake or poorly made drugs.
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In a study of communities in Massachusetts with high numbers of opioid overdose deaths, the implementation of overdose education and naloxone distribution (OEND) was associated with a significant reduction in opioid overdose death rates.
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Despite data on rising rates of abuse and overdoses of narcotic pain medicines across all age groups, in a new poll from the University of Michigan, most parents said they are not very concerned about misuse of these medicines by children and teens.
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With a new insight into a model of Parkinson's disease, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine have identified a novel target for mitigating some of the disease's toll on the brain.
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Researchers at the University of Granada, Spain, and Santo Tomas University in Colombia have found that drug abuse negatively affects sexual performance in men even after years of abstinence. This finding contradicts other studies reporting that men spontaneously recovered their normal sexual performance at three weeks after quitting substance abuse.
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Researchers have found that naloxone distribution to heroin users could reduce the number of deaths from overdose while being cost-effective.
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NPR's "Shots" blog examines how "opportunists who market street drugs may be undermining the global struggle against AIDS," writing, "In South Africa, two mainstay HIV drugs have found their way into recreational use."
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Buprenorphine is a safe and effective drug for treating opioid addiction. But as the prescribed use of buprenorphine has dramatically increased in recent years, accidental exposure of children to the drug has risen sharply, placing them at risk for serious injury and in extremely rare cases even death, according to researchers at the Utah Poison Control Center (UPCC), U School of Medicine's Department of Family and Preventive Health, and the Utah Department of Health (UDOH).
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A medication being tested to help smokers kick the habit also may help avoid the weight gain that is common after quitting but only in women, according to a study published in the December issue of Biological Psychiatry. This is the first medication shown to reduce weight gain for up to one year in women smokers who quit.
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A Viewpoint article published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that the clinical practice of prescribing amphetamines, opioids, and benzodiazepines to treat chronic pain may be contributing to the increase in fatal drug overdoses and the likelihood that those drugs will be diverted to the illegal market.
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