From the Montreal Gazette:
Drug studies bewilder consumers
Another day, another prescription-drug demolition. This time, the headline targets atenolol, a beta-blocker used by thousands of Canadians to combat high blood pressure and, presumably, to stave off strokes and heart attacks.

Well, it does no such thing, say the authors of a review in the Lancet, a muckraking British medical journal that regularly publishes explosive findings about everything from genetically modified foods to civilian mortality in Iraq. Not only does atenolol perform no better than a placebo in the cardiac-arrest department, it creates "significantly higher mortality" when compared with other high-blood-pressure prescription drugs.