I just don't buy the paternalism. People have free will, if they want to do something they would regret later, it's still their right.

That quote doesn't say what you think it means. It's not talking at all about whether suicides shifted to other methods; it only says that there was a secular decline in poisonings (-32%) and suicides in general (-10%) during the study, so they have to also discount some of the raw 48% drop in paracetamol as being part of that broader trend and not due to the treatment. They come to the 43% number only with a generous assumption that had the law not gone into effect, there would have been an increasing trend in deaths from paracetamol poisoning, which seems wrong to me. The more obvious way to derive the prior would be to look at non-paracetamol poisonings and expect the same trend, in which case the effect might be something like -24%.

Anyhow, it's still perfectly possible that the people who were deterred from paracetamol poisoning committed suicide some other way; the data in that paper says nothing about it.

> People have free will, if they want to do something they would regret later, it's still their right.

Then this minor frictional measure is the very least of your worries. For a start, any given pharmacy has an entire pharmacopoea of compounds that people are kept away from for their own good. Not to mention liquor licensing rules making landlords cut folks off at a bar if visibly drunk etc. And guard rails to stop people climbing to high places. And ... preventing people from doing stupid shit in the moment is everywhere in our societies.

There are a heck of a lot of things I'd put higher up my list of concerns than "may have to visit two shops if wanting to kill myself"