Hundreds of thousands of illegal prescription drugs have been found by authorities in an international one-week blitz on the illicit trade.

Cork woman Vera Twomey arrived at the Dáil yesterday with hundreds of supporters after walking from Cork to Dublin to demand access to medicinal cannabis for her daughter.

One in eight people have taken a medicine that was not prescribed for them.

Anabolic steroids, increasingly popular among young males to obtain a pumped-up physique, accounted for more than half of the 60,000 counterfeit units of medicine seized in a single week by Irish enforcement agencies in partnership with the Health Products Regulatory Authority (HPRA).

There has been a marked decline in the number of people reading product information for medicines, it has emerged.