Low Risk

search-drugs

Search for drug information using FDA database

How to control search-drugs ↓

What search-drugs does on Medical

AI agents call search-drugs to retrieve information from Medical without modifying anything — typically the context-gathering step in research, monitoring, and reporting workflows, before the agent takes action elsewhere.

Low Risk

Why search-drugs needs a policy

This tool performs a read-only search against a medical database (FDA). It retrieves and queries existing drug information with no side effects, data modification, code execution, or financial implications. The search operation is purely informational. Severity is low because misuse (e.g., searching for drugs repeatedly) poses minimal risk — no irreversible changes, no command execution, no financial impact.

From the tool's definition Tool is described as 'Search for drug information using FDA database' — a query operation that retrieves data without modification, creation, or execution of external operations.

Documented attack patterns abuse exactly the kind of access search-drugs gives an agent:

How to control search-drugs

PolicyLayer is an MCP gateway — it sits between your AI agents and Medical, and nothing reaches the server without passing your rules. This is the rule we recommend for search-drugs:

policy.json
{
  "version": "1",
  "default": "deny",
  "tools": {
    "search-drugs": {}
  }
}

search-drugs is read-only, so it stays allowed — but everything else on the server is denied unless you say otherwise.

  1. Create a free account and register Medical — nothing to install.
  2. Add this policy — paste it, or build it visually.
  3. Point your MCP client (Claude, Cursor, anything) at your gateway URL.
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Free to start. No card required.

Related tools and policies

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Questions about search-drugs

What does the search-drugs tool do? +

Search for drug information using FDA database. It is categorised as a Read tool in the Medical MCP Server, which means it retrieves data without modifying state.

How do I enforce a policy on search-drugs? +

Register the Medical MCP server in PolicyLayer and add a rule for search-drugs: allow, deny, rate-limit, or require approval. Point your MCP client at the PolicyLayer proxy URL and the rule is enforced on every call, before it reaches Medical. Nothing to install.

What risk level is search-drugs? +

search-drugs is a Read tool with low risk. Read-only tools are generally safe to allow by default.

Can I rate-limit search-drugs? +

Yes. Add a rate_limit block to the search-drugs rule in your PolicyLayer policy. For example, setting max: 10 and window: 60 limits the tool to 10 calls per minute. Rate limits are tracked per agent session and reset automatically.

How do I block search-drugs completely? +

Set action: deny in the PolicyLayer policy for search-drugs. The AI agent will receive a policy violation error and cannot call the tool. You can also include a reason field to explain why the tool is blocked.

What MCP server provides search-drugs? +

search-drugs is provided by the Medical MCP server (jamesanz/medical-mcp). PolicyLayer sits as a proxy in front of this server to enforce policies before tool calls reach the server.

Enforce policy on every Medical tool call.

Start from Medical, add the rest of your stack, and see everything your agents can call. Then put policy on all of it.

Free to start. No card required.

16 Medical tools catalogued and risk-classified — across an index of 43,000+ MCP servers.

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