Comment by brainwad
10 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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...