Reports have surfaced that pop superstar Michael Jackson was spending as much as $48,000 per month on prescription drugs, including Demerol and Diprivan.
A sidelight of this story is the pharmacy that news reports say filled and delivered many of those orders: Mickey Fine Pharmacy & Grill in Beverly Hills.
Mickey Fine is a pretty snazzy-looking place. [...]

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On April 30, the secure site for the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program was hacked and replaced with the following message (expletives deleted):
ATTENTION VIRGINIA
I have your s—! In *my* possession, right now, are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I made an encrypted backup and deleted the original. Unfortunately for Virginia, their [...]

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We’ve written previously about FDA guidelines for proper disposal of prescription drugs. But with so many discarded medications winding up in landfills and, worse, the water supply, the best solution is no longer flushing drugs or throwing them away. It’s turning them in to prescription drug take-back programs in your community.
The problem, as [...]

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A group of students at California Northstate College of Pharmacy put together this short video on the dangers of sharing prescription drugs like penicillin and Adderall. (Remember, they’re training to be pharmacists — not actors.)

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I stumbled across this while reading Gawker: “Teen socialite” Peaches Geldof says the staff at the fashion magazine Nylon prefer prescription drugs over illegal drugs –

What’s the drug of choice at Nylon? “Klonopin.” Peaches was definitely the talky one. Why? “It’s just a very large prescription drug culture.”…
This confirms our highly anecdotal evidence of [...]

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What could be more symbolic of the growing problem of prescription drug abuse among teenagers than this: a blond-haired, blue-eyed, 16-year-old cheerleader from a Christian high school selling Xanax, hydrocodone, Oxycontin, Demerol, and Percocet to fellow students from the comfort of the BMW her parents bought her?
The girl’s name is Hunter Ashton Johnson. If [...]

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The Cleveland Plain Dealer posted an article Tuesday night about the longstanding — and arguably worsening — problem of prescription drug abuse among health professionals.
The part of the story I found most compelling was the section on D. Christopher Hart, a disgraced pharmacist who has worked hard to redeem himself by educating others. [...]

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As we’ve been writing about here, teens who abuse prescription drugs often get them from their parents’ medicine cabinets. In many cases, the drugs are not currently being used by the parents; they were simply never discarded.
With this in mind, we’ve decided to reprint the federal government’s guidelines for the proper disposal [...]

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The Los Angeles Times reports on the growing problem of teen prescription drug abuse in today’s editions. Although the problem has been tied by some to the rise of Internet pharmacies, research shows that fewer than five percent of teen prescription drug abusers buy drugs from strangers (a category that includes online pharmacies). [...]

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The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA), last week issued a fascinating survey of teens. Two results stood out to me:
1. Teens (aged 12 to 17) indicated, for the first time, that it is easier to acquire “prescription drugs such as OxyContin, Percocet, Vicodin or Ritalin, without a prescription” [...]

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