What even is the point of having separate categories of prescription and OTC drugs if there's nothing stopping unapproved drugs from being sold over the counter?
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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Another part of the problem is that these unapproved 'health supplements' are often not even checked to see if they contain what they claim to contain. Unsurprisingly, some of them contain prescription pharmaceuticals. And even when it is discovered that those products do have them, they aren't always taken off the market.
https://www.snexplores.org/article/many-food-supplements-unlawfully-contain-drugs
It's nuts.
But God forbid we let the FDA have a look at these supplements, because if we did, the Pyramid Scheme Industrial Complex would collapse and with it the economy of Utah and the finances of the LDS Church.
They tried to pass a bill regulating them in the early 90s. All the supplements companies took out ads screaming that doctors were trying to take your vitamins away. Very unpopular, bill went down in flames.
Like no, doctors just don't want people getting amphetamines in their creatine supplement. Or unexpectedly getting St John's wart in some supplement that doesn't list it as an ingredient, suddenly causing severe and dangerous interactions with multiple medications the person is taking. It says a lot about the supplement industry that they fight tooth and nail against any regulation that would require them to accurately report what's in the bottle. They can basically just make it up out of thin air as it is. Tons of supplement makers with expensive "proprietary blends" where they don't even attempt to show what's inside, then market them toward incurable diseases like alzheimers, very carefully avoiding the name of the disease in advertising, and taking money out of their pockets in exchange for false hope. Looking at you neuriva. If your blend actually works, test it, patent it, become billionaires (they won't because it doesn't).
And some being sold are just straight up harmful. You can hop on Amazon right now and buy 250 mg /pill vitamin b6 supplements. If they're reporting that accurately, that's a toxic dose that could be harmful to your health and even cause neuropathy (ironically many who take it are hoping it will help with neuropathy, but that's only true if you're deficient, and you don't need anywhere near that amount even if deficient).
where downsides
Only upside land ahead
I the FDA can't even keep up with trying to approve legitimate pharmaceutical drugs, let's not task them with looking at random s*** too.
Give them more resources then.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again; strip the army and arm the FDA. Lead in your cinnamon pills? Sniped.
No quarter.
My country made basically that in the 50's, now we have one of the few Blue Zones in the world
How about they just investigate and prosecute.
Take away profits, business licenses and import licenses.
Welcome to research chemicals. They invent new drugs and sell them wherever until the DEA puts them on the restricted or regulated schedule, then they just make a new drug that has just a little different chemical compound but still essentially does the same thing as the last one that got banned and start the process all over. It's a legal loop hole for selling drugs.
The worst part is that each replacement generation is almost always worse than the predecessor. Just take the cannibinoids, JWH-018 was sketchy, but anything after that was Hella sketchy and had some terrible side effects.
I think the situation blurs with "natural" things
Yeah I always thought over the counter meant it was checked before being put behind the counter unlike stuff on the floor
Because the rules are made up as the ruling class goes along.
These aren’t being sold to treat anything. They are just sold with flashy labels but no claims.
Historically OTC drugs were just drugs that existed before the fda was formed, and therefore were exempted from the rules. OTC drugs are almost always less regulated, less tested, and have had less research done on them. Hence the whole thing with allergy meds last year.
Allergy meds last year?
WASHINGTON — The leading decongestant used by millions of Americans looking for relief from a stuffy nose is no better than a dummy pill, according to government experts who reviewed the latest research on the long-questioned drug ingredient.
In theory, the active ingredients in these nonprescription products are considered safe and effective when consumers follow the instructions on the label, without direction from a health care provider. In practice, however, many contain ingredients that the Food and Drug Administration has not yet evaluated. Still other OTC products that are known to be misused or abused remain on the market with no changes to the label to warn customers.3
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He stumbled upon tianeptine by chance when he popped into a gas station in search of medication to relieve his migraine, according to his mom. The gas station didn’t have Excedrin, but an employee there offered Morrison a bottle of pills called Tianaa, a popular brand of tianeptine.
So Morrison took it like Tylenol, popping a couple at a time over the next few hours.
Just three of the 15 tianeptine pills in the bottle remained, Terry said.
Hmmm... seems a bit fishy. Who takes 12 Tylenol that quickly? I think the REAL story is this kid wanted to get ripped, had probably bought this crap before and took a megadose after feeling a buzz.
Popping 12 of anything you get from a gas station is probably a bad idea.
Taking 12 ibuprofen probably isn't good for you.
I was always paranoid about overdosing on literally anything as when I was at university one girl managed to overdose on prescription medication and nearly died. She was fine in the end and 2 hours after being released from hospital was doing shots (because at 18 you are indestructible), but it was quite a shock you could die from prescription medicine.
Apparently paracetamol (or whatever the non name brand is) has one of the closest effective and lethal doses out of most household and social drugs. Lethal (Ld50 anyway) is something like 3x the recommended dose??
Paracetamol and ibuprofen are not the same drug, and ibuprofen is not the name brand as far as I'm aware
I know - similar conversation, different drug.
You'd have to eat a lot of paracetamol to kill yourself in one go, and it's a slow, horrible death of liver failure. I'm lazy N not looking up numbers at the moment, afaik the you're going to die zone is something like 8-10 grams, max FDA safe dose is 3.5 or 4. You shouldn't take more than 800-1200mg at adult male size though, it's extremely hard on the liver at high doses.
paracetamol is a horrible, horrible way to go. You'll spend days in a hospital bed, needing but intelligible for a transplant.
That was my impression too. Plus, he didn’t really die of an overdose per se, he choked on his own vomit from the pizza rolls. The same thing could happen with alcohol, Ambien, or even heavy sleeping.
It’s a tragedy for sure, but I’m not sure that this particular case is rock solid evidence that the product needs to be taken off the shelves. It would be a good idea to get this stuff regulated for quality though.
vape shops in the US sale it too sometimes
big issue here not just with tianeptine pills
most products in vape shops and gas stations are either fake and/or inferior quality and/or questionable
includes nicotine vape products, hemp selections, fake THC products, etcetera
unregulated and/or fake products are a huge problem in the US and are not being handled in the same way as other things in the marketplace
also some of these products are sold out of package individually with no food regulations (no handwashing with gloves or anything to do with food safety)
all this overshadows what could be a regulated market with lab tested and correctly dosed/portioned products sold at specifically licensed dispensaries with staff trained in these fields
at this point it is starting to look intentionally set up and kept like this to keep the population in a certain place
these products are also widely available in the US due to dealers catching on to the lower prices of these alternatives and due to the option of possibly getting this item or others mentioned online with overnight shipping sometimes being an option
Intentionally set up... well sort of in my opinion. All in all it is about money. Testing and what not cost a ton of money. And that would reduce what can be funneled to "other" places. It would also cost money to the people selling the crap. So that makes it politically unpopular. They don't need a nefarious agenda to do the wrong thing, they do that naturally.
It's a shit show either way. I remember when vaping started, it was pretty awesome that it was unregulated and a lot of experimentation, discussion and "consumer led" development.
The regulations and outright bans on vaping pushed by the WHO were and still are concessions to puritanical thinking (no harm reduction for smokers!) or support for nicotine replacement therapies (much less effective like patch). And of course they also lead to a few big companies being able to afford the regulations (big tobacco) now being able to compete against smaller companies (less competition).
But of course without any regulations, sooner or later you have other "big whatever" corporations pushing shitty unsafe products. And once money is flowing they will always lobby and capture the legislation to improve profit instead of competition or better quality or safer products.
Regulations are a major form of power that is very badly managed. The economic power / money behind this leads to major distortions and corruption. In many cases new ideology is being crafted by PR campaigns that have long term effects. We need to get some kind of democratic control into this, maybe like a fifth estate comprised of nerds that can act quickly and smartly and have no political or monetary incentive.
The answer is education, not prohibition.
You can't effectively use an education if products overtly lie about their contents/effects or are contaminated.
education includes learning to distrust marketing. as well as to be suspicious of new too-good-to-be-true products.
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The answer is regulation not prohibition. There's a big difference between "this is illegal, you're under arrest if we catch you with it" and "this is being sold illegally, we'll pull your business license if you keep selling it" or "this product is mislabeled and contaminated, we're banning it from being imported".
Tianeptine is extremely dangerous, and the fact that it's being sold as an entirely unregulated supplement is a bad thing.
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Education+regulations
I agree. 👍
Absolutist statements like this generally confuse political discourse, not simplify it. America prohibits the sale of lots of things and people don't mind.
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