Comment by Nursie

11 hours ago

When was this changed?

I arrived in Aus in 2021 and was amazed to be able to buy a pack of 40+, coming from the UK where the limit had been in place for some years.

6 comments

Nursie

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brainwad  9 hours ago

You can still buy 100 packs, they are just behind the counter at chemists. TBH it's a rather stupid restriction - do they think people only ever own 1 packet of paracetamol at a time? In my household we have at least half a dozen, including a 100-pack from Oz and a 500-pack from America.

  • Nursie  8 hours ago

    Oh right - that's probably what we did, buy a big pack from behind the counter.

    I don't think you can even do that in the UK.

    Yeah we usually have a few packs hanging around, and I get the 'it seems stupid' thing, but sometimes just adding a tiny bit of friction when someone's trying to kill themselves might save a life. I dunno, I hope that's shown in the evidence anyway. Otherwise it's just pointless like the whole pseudoephedrine song and dance, which has inconvenienced anyone looking for a decongestant while doing sweet FA to the availability of meth.

    • brainwad  5 hours ago

      > Oh right - that's probably what we did, buy a big pack from behind the counter.

      No, when you visited they were still on the shelf. They only put them behind the counter in 2025.

      > sometimes just adding a tiny bit of friction when someone's trying to kill themselves might save a life

      I'm philosophically not for making suicide harder. If someone wants to die, that's their right. And practically, while you might be able to show a stat-sig decrease in paracetamol poisoning, I'd expect the suicides to largely just move to other methods.

      1 reply →

    • zimpenfish  7 hours ago

      > I hope that's shown in the evidence anyway

      tl;dr: Yes

      Paraphrasing from [0], after September 1998 when the restriction was introduced, "The annual number of deaths from paracetamol poisoning decreased by 21% [...] the number from salicylates decreased by 48% [...] Liver transplant rates after paracetamol poisoning decreased by 66% [...] The rate of non-fatal self poisoning with paracetamol in any form decreased by 11%"

      See also [1]: "in the 11 years following the legislation there were an estimated 765 fewer suicide and open verdict deaths from paracetamol poisoning, which represented a reduction of 43% [...] This reduction was largely unaltered after controlling for a downward trend in deaths involving other methods of poisoning and also suicides by all methods."

      [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC31616/

      [1] https://www.psych.ox.ac.uk/research/research-groups/csr/rese...