Editorial standards
How we source information
Drug information is a “your money or your life” topic, so we hold a hard line on sourcing: we synthesize in our own words from authoritative, commercial-safe sources, cite every claim, and mark anything we can’t verify as “Unknown, pending review.” We never guess dosages and never auto-generate clinical claims.
Sources we use
- PubChem (NIH/NLM): Chemical identity: formula, IUPAC name, SMILES, InChIKey, CID. RDKit-verified.
- NIDA & MedlinePlus (NIH): Plain-language effects and health-risk information.
- openFDA & DailyMed (FDA/NLM): Approved-drug labels, pharmaceutical pill appearance and imprints.
- DEA & eCFR: US controlled-substance scheduling and statutes.
- WHO: International scheduling and expert reviews.
- EMCDDA / EUDA: European drug-checking and adulteration data.
- NLM Pillbox archive (data.gov): Pharmaceutical pill identification dataset.
Sources we never use
To keep the site commercial-safe and clinically defensible, we do not cite or scrape user-generated, anecdotal, or commercial-health-content sites, including: DrugsData / EcstasyData, Erowid, PsychonautWiki, drugs.com, Healthline, TripSit.
Our citation rules
- Every factual claim carries a source and a retrieval date.
- No public source ⇒ the field reads “Unknown, pending review.”
- Clinical dosing stays “Pending medical reviewer” unless a public clinical source states it.
- Drug interactions are never inferred by an AI, only sourced or marked unknown.
See also our review methodology and the medical advisory board.