If you need a prescription medicine to relieve pain, you should steer clear of a medicine called propoxyphene. Although millions of prescriptions are written for this drug each year, expert advisors to the Food and Drug Administration recommended last Friday that it be taken off the market because it has been associated with deadly overdoses and suicides.

The drug, which for decades has been sold as a generic and under the brand name Darvon, is approved by the FDA for treating mild to moderate pain. It is also used in various generic and branded combination products, such as Darvocet, that contain acetaminophen.

More than 22 million prescriptions were written for propoxyphene products in 2007. The drug already has been banned in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Sweden. A citizen's petition filed by the watchdog group Public Citizen urging the FDA to ban propoxyphene products in the U.S. spurred the agency to convene a joint meeting of two of its advisory committees.

The committees voted 14-12 that drugs containing propoxyphene should be pulled from the market. It's not certain the FDA will follow this recommendation. The agency does not have to follow the advice of its advisory committees, but it often does.