Drugs or medicines may be withdrawn from commercial markets because of risks to patients, but also because of commercial reasons (e.g. lack of demand and relatively high production costs) or because it turns out that they are less effective in clinical practice than premarketing efficacy trials suggested. When risks or harms are the cause, withdrawals will usually have been prompted by unexpected adverse effects that were not detected during the early, premaketing, clinical trials, i.e. they became apparent only from postmarketing surveillance data collected from the wider community during routine use over longer periods of time.

This list is not limited to drugs that were ever approved by specific jurisdictions. Some of them (lumiracoxib, rimonabant, tolrestat, ximelagatran, and zimeldine, for example) received marketing approval in Europe but had not yet been approved for marketing in the United States when adverse effects became clear and they were withdrawn from the market. Some drugs in this list (e.g. LSD) were never approved for marketing in the United States or Europe.