Short answers, pulled from the story.
A medication is a drug used to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent disease. It is also called a medicine, pharmaceutical drug, medicinal product, or simply a drug. A medication with no active ingredient, used only in research studies, is called a placebo.
A blockbuster drug is a drug that generates more than one billion dollars in revenue for a pharmaceutical company in a single year. Cimetidine was the first drug ever to reach more than one billion dollars a year in sales, making it the first blockbuster drug.
In 2010, the research and development cost of each new molecular entity was approximately 1.8 billion dollars. Drug discovery is a lengthy, expensive, and inefficient process, and most candidates fail during the expensive Phase I, II, and III clinical trials.
Medications can be taken orally as tablets, capsules, or syrups, which is the most common route. Other routes include sublingual under the tongue, topical on the skin, transdermal patches, inhalation, and injections such as intramuscular, subcutaneous, intravenous, intrathecal, and epidural.
Antibiotics first arrived on the medical scene in 1932 thanks to Gerhard Domagk and were called the wonder drugs. The introduction of sulfa drugs dropped the US pneumonia mortality rate from 0.2 percent each year to 0.05 percent by 1939, and streptomycin, found in 1942, was the first drug effective against tuberculosis.
Pharmaceutical medications are described as ubiquitous in lakes, rivers, streams, estuaries, seawater, and soil at concentrations in the nanogram to microgram per liter range. They reach the environment mainly through wastewater treatment plant effluent and agricultural antibiotic use, and the US Geological Survey classifies these Environmentally Persistent Pharmaceutical Pollutants as Ecological Disrupting Compounds.