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The patient didn’t overdose on medication. She overdosed on grapefruit juice. The 42-year-old was barely responding when her husband brought her to the emergency room. Her heart rate was slowing, and her blood pressure was falling. Doctors had to insert a breathing tube, and then a pacemaker, to revive her. They were mystified: The patient’s husband said she suffered from migraines and was taking a blood pressure drug called verapamil to help prevent the headaches. But blood tests showed she had an alarming amount of the drug in her system, five times the safe level. Did she overdose? Was she...

In 1989, a group of Canadian researchers studying a blood pressure drug were astonished to discover that drinking a glass of grapefruit juice dangerously increased the drug's potency. They were testing the effects of drinking alcohol on a medicine called Plendil. The scientists needed something that would hide the taste of alcohol so that subjects would know only that they were taking the drug and not know whether they were drinking alcohol with it. "One Saturday night, my wife and I tested everything in the refrigerator," said David G. Bailey, a research scientist at the London Health Sciences Center in...