How do drugs know where to go in the body?

I have no medical training whatsoever but even I know that IV treatment is the most effective and efficient way of getting meds into the bloodstream. Just not so much fun being on an IV drip for 3 hours.

Drug delivery is a very interesting and important topic, and also a huge subject in research. Ideally, the drug should bind just to the targeted receptor (especially aggressive ones such as in cancer therapy), but such selectivity is rare, and thus side effects occur. Various drug-transporting "containers", triggers, or very specific structures for selective binding are being investigated, but we are still far from a general solution.

I have no medical training whatsoever but even I know that IV treatment is the most effective and efficient way of getting meds into the bloodstream. Just not so much fun being on an IV drip for 3 hours.

Even junkies, or rather, junkies especially, know this =)

Pharmacology can be made extremely interesting because there are many examples where the drugs way to reach their active site or their mechanism of action follow unexpected processes. The difficult part is not to enter into too many details because that quickly becomes boring. This article does a very nice work keeping it general and simple.