The removal of three over-the-counter pharmaceuticals from aqueous solution using four different adsorbents was analyzed. To study the effect of infused pharmaceutical and adsorbent on the adsorption system, both the concentration of drug and adsorbent dosage were varied, with constant temperature and pressure at different contact time. Adsorption kinetics, isotherm models, and ANOVA allegorized a generic trend for pharmaceutical removal efficiency of the adsorbents that varied as follows: activated carbon > fly ash > bentonite > sugar cane bagasse ash. The Tempkin model appears to fit the isotherm data better than Freundlich and Langmuir. Correspondingly, the kinetic studies implied a pseudo-second-order fit, to understand the mechanism by which the solute accumulates on the surface of a solid and gets adsorbed to the surface via intra-particle diffusion. Furthermore, some special cases of removal tendencies were noted based on sorbate-sorbent interaction. Effectively, it was observed that at an adsorbent loading of 2 g and initial concentration of 0.2 mmol L−1, bentonite, fly ash, and activated carbon were able to strip more than 80% of all pharmaceuticals from urine. A framework for the highest significance of the experiments was obtained using response surface methodology by the combination of ciprofloxacin-bentonite followed by paracetamol-activated carbon and ibuprofen-activated carbon. Quasi-Newton and Bayesian regression methods were implemented on Langmuir isotherm by designing the neural network for the batch adsorption experiments. Based on the numerical calculations and graphical representations, the proposed model leads to the result that error is minimized and the values are optimized for different pharmaceuticals such as paracetamol, ibuprofen, ciprofloxacin that can be removed from wastewater streams by locally available adsorbents. [Figure not available: see fulltext.] © 2019, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.