1. Common and shared responsibility is a principle of international law and is applied in many fields of cooperation. It is thus not specific to drug control. Whereas international treaties establish a set of rules creating individual obligations for States parties, the principle of common and shared responsibility goes much further. It provides the framework for a cooperative partnership among...

Oral controlled drug delivery has gathered tremendous attention over the years due to its many advantages over conventional dosage forms. Polymer-based matrices have become an integral part of the pharmaceutical industry. Hydrophilic matrices are capable of controlling the release of drug over an extended period of time. Hydrophilic polymers, especially the hydrophilic derivatives of cellulose ...

Recent developments have implicated cannabinoid CB1 receptors as a novel target for a new class of therapeutic agents used to treat drug addiction. CB1 receptors are expressed in the motivational circuitry of the brain and modulate drug seeking. Blockade of the CB1 receptor is particularly effective in reducing cue-induced reinstatement of drug seeking, an animal analogue of cue-induced relapse...

From the year 2000, the national drug expenditure has seen an increase from RM346 million ($91 million) to RM915 million ($241 million) in 2005. From the year 2004 to 2005, an increase of 13.3% was recorded [1]. Factors that may contribute to this increase include increase in drug prices, a growing and aging population, higher expectation of the public regarding equality in assessing therapy, l...

TO THE EDITOR—How does the global community gain more traction in an effort to combat multidrug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis globally? We have considered whether it would be helpful to address MDR tuberculosis as a separate epidemic. We introduced the idea because the dominant strategy globally for the past 2 decades has been based on the premise that MDR tuberculosis could be controlled by str...

This work presents a compartmental model for delivery of drugs under anesthesia and an advanced model based control algorithm for insulin delivery for Type 1 diabetes. The model for anesthesia involves choice of three drugs isoflurane, dopamine and sodium nitroprusside, which allows simultaneous regulation of mean arterial pressure and unconsciousness of the patients. A number of dynamic simula...

A century ago, the Chinese opium epidemic spurred international action on drug control as policymakers realized that the problem was too complex for any one country to tackle in isolation. Starting with the International Opium Commission (Shanghai, 1909), Governments over time established an international consensus on the need for the regulation of psychoactive substances. Moreover, a set of no...

Victims of AIDS and other incurable diseases are denied access to potentially valuable experimental drugs by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Under the present law, no new drug or medical device can be sold until it has been approved as safe and effective" by the FDA. New-drug approval is an expensive process that routinely takes years to complete. Unapproved experimental products cannot ...