Great example, because Tylenol is more dangerous than nearly every illegal drug.

gamblor956 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Today I learned on the Internet that Tylenol is more dangerous than meth, cocaine, or fentanyl.

Wait, no I didn't. That's absurd. Tylenol can cause long term health issues if used in excess (or death, for extreme overdoses), but most illegal drugs are illegal because they can cause immediate death even at normal usage amounts.

	▲	inigyou 13 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Meth used to be available over the counter in pharmacies in the US. No drug I'm aware of causes immediate death in normal usage, except perhaps those used for lethal injection. Would you like to elaborate on that? Tylenol, on the other hand, causes an unpreventable (no antidote) slow drawn out death over about a week, where your body will be slowly decaying and you have time to say goodbye to all your loved ones, if you take a few times the normal dose by mistake
	▲	AngryData 15 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You would have had a better point if you didn't include cocaine which is only really dangerous for people with severe heart problems or by using it in combination with depressive drugs that it temporarily suppresses. If cocaine was really a problem then C-suites and politicians would be regularly dieing.

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mlrtime a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Now do H20, very harmful at high amounts.

	▲	hoppyhoppy2 a day ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not chemistry-minded enough to know what H20 would be, but I suspect you meant H2O. ("O" as in oxygen, not "0" as in zero.) (and of course the "2" would normally be subscript, but this is HN)

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inigyou 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

For those who downvote: it's true. Look it up.

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tsimionescu 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's not true, as "dangerous" doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. Just because Tylenol (acetaminophen) is highly toxic in actually quite small doses doesn't make it as dangerous as vicodin or morphine or heroin or meth or fentanyl.

A drug is dangerous when it is toxic at an easily obtainable dose AND there is a clear incentive for people to consume it in that dose, such as addiction and tolerance. While acetaminophen is unusually toxic at doses only slightly higher than regular treatment doses, there is actually very little that compels people to use those doses, and acetaminophen toxicity is not an epidemic-level health problem the way many other drugs have become.

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everforward 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Acetaminophen overdose does actually have a surprisingly high rate of occurrence. A lot of people don’t realize how narrow the therapeutic band is.

Doubling your meds on a bad pain day can put you way beyond the safe limits. People think it’s safe because basically every other OTC has a huge therapeutic band, and double dosing is not recommended but not really dangerous.

CDC estimates it at 56,000 ER visits a year, 26,000 hospitalizations, 458 deaths, about a hundred unintentional deaths per year. As a point of reference, it’s about 3 accidental overdose deaths per child that dies from being locked in a hot car.

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inigyou 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This sounds like a rationalisation to me. People take Tylenol for pain. If they're still in pain, they take more of it. Tylenol doesn't mitigate all types of pain so people might think they need more. This happens, and then they die. It happens surprisingly infrequently considering how abnormally dangerous the drug is, but it still happens.

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tsimionescu 17 hours ago | parent [-]

Tylenol only works for relatively low levels of pain, which tends to be relatively short term. So abuse is not very common, and even with chronic pain, Tylenol overdosing kills quite quickly, it doesn't have time to become a habit that takes down entire families together with the chronic pain sufferer.

Either way, we don't have to assume, we can directly check the numbers. Per another commenter, Tylenol kills about 458 people in the USA every year. In contrast, death from overdose on illegal stimulants was estimated at ~33.000 people in the USA.

Now, is it fair to say that Tylenol is more dangerous than marijuana? Of course. But to say it's more dangerous than most illegal drugs? Obviously not.

	▲	inigyou 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I wonder what the death rate on those other stimulants would be if they were issued the same way, in regulated pharmacy stores. I know that a lot of illegal drug overdoses are caused by people who thought they were taking a normal dose but got the wrong substance, wrong amount or wrong concentration from their dealer - who in many cases also didn't know about the discrepancy because of unreliable supply chains and difficulty of testing, both caused by illegality.

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gruez 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Again, that's missing the point of drug regulation. There's plenty of substances even more dangerous than Tylenol, but aren't banned. "Drugs" are banned due to a combination of (perceived) harm to user/society, potential for abuse, as well as toxicity. That's why there's plenty of substances more toxic than Tylenol, but aren't banned.

	▲	inigyou 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		But that's missing the point of the discussion. Yes things are banned based on perceived harm instead of actual danger, that's the point of the discussion.