Drugs

Two 17-year-old girls have been sentenced for torturing and butchering an elderly woman, less than three weeks after a pair of 10-year-olds were charged with murdering a toddler. Again, a troubled nation is asking, how could this happen? Edna Phillips, 70, was throttled with her dog's leash and stabbed or slashed 86 times. The mental images of the crime have shocked the nation just as the video pictures of little James Bulger being led to his death did last month.

As the war on drugs has spread from Mexico to Central America, so has the U.S. role in Honduras. Pentagon contracts are helping to fund new military bases in remote regions of that country, and U.S. troops and special Drug Enforcement Administration agents have been deployed to train local security forces and assist in counter-narcotics operations. It's a delicate partnership, and one that is already causing controversy. Last week the Obama administration confirmed that DEA agents were with Honduran security forces aboard a U.S. helicopter during a botched May 11 operation.

WASHINGTON - An experimental treatment for multiple sclerosis has caused death, strokes, nerve damage and abdominal bleeding and has no proven benefits for sufferers of the disease, the Food and Drug Administration warned Thursday. Known as liberation therapy, the treatment targets chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency - or CCSVI - a narrowing of the veins in the head and neck. It involves inserting balloons or stents into veins to widen them in an attempt to relieve the symptoms of MS. The FDA received reports in 2011 of a patient who died from bleeding in the brain after undergoing the treatment and another who was left permanently paralyzed by a stroke.

Galaxy goalkeeper Josh Saunders, who left the team a month ago to enroll in Major League Soccer's substance abuse and behavioral health program, was back on the training field Tuesday. But it's unclear how long it will be before he can play again. Saunders, who held the Houston Dynamo scoreless in last November's MLS Cup final, said he was not being treated for drug or alcohol abuse, attributing his absence to personal issues. "I was under some stress," said Saunders, 31, who started this season as a starting keeper for the first time in his eight-year MLS career.

In the heart of the Ethiopian community here, a group of friends gathered after work in an office to chew on dried khat leaves before going home to their wives and children. Sweet tea and sodas stood on a circular wooden table between green mounds of the plant, a mild narcotic grown in the Horn of Africa. As the sky grew darker the conversation became increasingly heated, flipping from religion to jobs to local politics. Suddenly, one of the men paused and turned in his chair.

Watching Alzheimer's disease steal away the memory, talents and very selves of its victims is hard enough for the people who love them. Now, a new pill formulated by a respected pharmaceutical company and approved by the Food and Drug Administration will do little to help most patients and will bring misery to some, say two medical investigators. The drug, Aricept 23 mg, is no more effective on the whole than the disappointing ones already on the market - but is more likely to cause gastrointestinal problems, wrote Drs. Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz of Dartmouth Medical College in an article published Thursday in the medical journal BMJ. The new formulation was devised to serve commercial objectives, they say, and was approved despite a poor showing in company-sponsored tests.

The wife of a Sunny Hills High School teacher was convicted and sentenced to one year of house arrest Friday for planting drugs and a gun in the trunk of her estranged husband's car in a conspiracy that led to the popular history teacher's wrongful arrest for having drugs on campus. Devon Eileen Abbott, 33, and her boyfriend, Soloman Brian Silver, 42, conspired to hide a shotgun, marijuana and prescription pills in the vehicle of Gregory Abbott. The two successfully schemed to have him arrested for crimes he did not commit.

In a study suggesting that red wine might be the next big thing in breast cancer prevention, a study has found that women who drank just under two servings of red wine daily experienced hormonal changes that mimic the effects of a drug used to prevent malignant breast tumors from coming back. The study, published Friday in the Journal of Women's Health, found that consuming the same amount of white wine did not have the same effect in premenopausal women participating in the study.

Americans spend billions on hair-care products each year, a remarkable investment for a part of the body with no real function. We clean it, nourish it and style it -- and we definitely mourn its loss. Lots of products and procedures promise to restore thinning or disappearing hair. One especially intriguing option is the HairMax LaserComb, a hand-held laser device that supposedly revives hair follicles.

For patients with high levels of so-called bad cholesterol, doctors routinely reach for two remedies: cholesterol-lowering statin drugs and a diet that cuts out foods high in saturated fat, such as ice cream, red meat and butter. But new research has found that when it comes to lowering artery-clogging cholesterol, what you eat may be more important than what you don't eat. Released online Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., the study found that incorporating several cholesterol-lowering foods — such as soy protein and nuts — into a diet can reduce bad cholesterol far more effectively than a diet low in saturated fat. In fact, the authors assert, levels of LDL, the "bad" cholesterol, can drop to half that seen by many patients who take statins, sold under such names as Lipitor, Crestor or Zocor.

SAN DIEGO - Alleged drug kingpin Victor Emilio Cazares, among the most wanted trafficking suspects in the United States, has been arrested in Mexico, U.S. and Mexican officials say, despite having changed his appearance through plastic surgery. A senior U.S. law enforcement official in Mexico confirmed this week that Cazares was captured April 8 at a highway checkpoint near the western city of Guadalajara. Mexican authorities on Friday confirmed Cazares was in custody. Mexican authorities did not make the arrest public at the time, and it has not been previously reported.

SAN DIEGO —Two members of a Mexican organized crime group that terrorized border communities were found guilty Wednesday of taking part in the strangling deaths of two men whose bodies were later dissolved in lye and dumped at a ranch outside San Diego. The mens' ruthless tactics were the trademark of a gang that broke off from the drug cartel waging war in Tijuana nearly a decade ago, according to prosecutors. The Palillos, or Toothpicks, came to the San Diego area in 2003 after splitting from the notorious Arellano Felix drug cartel.

Peter Fuller, who never fully accepted the ruling that stripped the 1968 Kentucky Derby crown from his thoroughbred Dancer's Image, died Monday of cancer at a skilled-care facility in Portsmouth, N.H., his family said. He was 89. In May 1968, Dancer's Image rallied from last place in a field of 14 to win the Derby by a length and a half. Days later, traces of the drug phenylbutazone were found in the horse's post-race urinalysis, and the colt was disqualified. The medication is commonly used to alleviate chronic pain and joint soreness, not to enhance performance.

Attorneys for a former Westminster police detective will try to persuade a jury that he was under the influence of the antidepressant Zoloft and not responsible for the kidnap and rape of a woman in 2010. Det. Anthony Nicholas Orban was so overwhelmed by the prescription drug that he was mentally "unconscious" and "totally unaware of his actions," attorney James Blatt said outside a Rancho Cucamonga courtroom where his client's trial began Monday. "But for the use of Zoloft, Mr. Orban would not have committed these acts," Blatt said.

MEXICO CITY - Mexican authorities responding to an anonymous tip discovered about 50 mostly mutilated bodies dumped on the side of a highway between Monterrey and the U.S. border, a region where rival gangs are battling for control over a lucrative drug-trafficking corridor. The bodies of at least 43 men and half a dozen women were found Sunday in plastic garbage bags near the town of Cadereyta Jimenez, the location of a large state-run oil refinery, officials in the state prosecutor's office told The Times.

Every parent knows what it's like to fail his or her child in some important way. We speak a hurtful word. We are absent at a critical moment, or we simply fail to hear what our children are telling us. The three moms I met this week at the Homegirl Café know this feeling well. It was a few days before Mother's Day and we sat down together for lunch and talked about the many sorrows they've inflicted on their children. "You make wrong choices, and your kids pay for them," Veronica Duran, a 39-year-old mother of two, told me. The personal histories of these three moms include drug abuse, homelessness and stints in prison that caused them to miss many, many of their sons' and daughters' birthdays.

Lipitor is the most prescribed name-brand drug in America - nearly 3.5 million people take it every day to control their cholesterol. Since the statin entered the market in 1997, it's earned New York-based pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. $81 billion, making it the best-selling prescription drug of all time, according to IMS Health, a Danbury, Conn.-based healthcare information company. So when Lipitor's patent protection came to an end Nov. 30 and a generic alternative became available, an awful lot of patients had a decision to make: Should they stick with the drug they knew or switch to something less expensive?

The widely used family of acid-reducing drugs that includes Prilosec, Nexium and Protonix increases the risk of bone fractures by about 25% and can more than double the risk of contracting the troublesome bacterium Clostridium difficile , new studies released Monday confirm. The increased risk is not thought to be caused by the drugs themselves, but by the sharply reduced levels of acid in the stomach and intestinal tract, which make the organs a more hospitable environment for infectious agents like C. difficile and which can impair the uptake of the calcium required for strong bones.

The proposed weight-loss drug Lorcaserin, rebuffed in its bid for Food and Drug Administration approval last October, on Thursday won a recommendation of approval from the agency's advisory committee, a major step toward winning the FDA's go-ahead to enter the U.S. market. If the agency follows the advice of the panel of independent experts--which is common but not routine-- Lorcaserin would become the first new prescription weight-loss drug to go on the U.S. market since Orlistat (now marketed over-the-counter as Alli)

Lenalidomide, sold under the tradename Revlimid, significantly improves progression-free survival in patients with myeloma, according to three clinical trials published Wednesday. All three trials were so successful that the results were unblinded early and, in two of the three trials, patients receiving the placebo were switched to the active drug. But researchers also found that the drug doubled the risk of a second, independent cancer occurring, and it is not yet clear whether the drug produces an increase in overall survival.