3 ms·

Do 500 mg or even 750mg sound that high? Paracetamol (the non-US name of acetaminophen) here in France is usually available either in 500mg or 1g doses, and Wi

by seszett 13y ago

Do 500 mg or even 750mg sound that high? Paracetamol (the non-US name of acetaminophen) here in France is usually available either in 500mg or 1g doses, and Wikipedia seems to say we had 6 deaths in 1990, and the number has been stable since then, so more than five times less than the US relative to population size. So, I'm not sure that dosage is the most important factor here.

shubb 13y ago
How many grams in total do you get in a pack? In a lot of Europe (certainly UK, I heard also France), you can only buy 16 pills (about 8g) at a time, unless your doctor writes you a ticket. The pills themselves may contain a lot of chemical, but the whole pack doesn't contain enough grams for a successful impulsive suicide. You would need to go to a second drug store, by which time you'd probably decide not to do it. Hence the reduction in death rate. The problem of liver damage due to chronic over use continues .
- seszett 13y ago
  Right, I had not thought about this aspect of things, both the 500mg and 1g tubes I have at home contain a total of only 8g. It doesn't seem difficult to accumulate more than 8g at home over time though, I'm not a big consumer of these and I have 12g at home, in three tubes. I remember my grand parents having a lot more packs at their place.
jonnathanson 13y ago
It's not the dosage per pill that's unsafe; it's the concentration over a period of time. Acetaminophen builds up in the system. I'd venture to guess that most acetaminophen/paracetamol users aren't popping Tylenol (etc.) every four hours for weeks at a time. But four Vicodin pills a day, taken over the course of a week or two -- not an unusual dosage for pain relief from major surgery or illness -- will concentrate an extremely large amount of acetaminophen in your system, because acetaminophen is eliminated fairly slowly from the body (and at great cost to the liver). You're probably not going to kill yourself taking that much acetaminophen. I've done it a few times, and I'm still here. But you might do some serious, potentially irreversible damage to your liver. It's sort of like heavy metal poisoning: it takes a lot to get an acutely toxic dose, but a slowly toxic dose can accumulate over time.

by seszett 13y ago

shubb 13y ago

How many grams in total do you get in a pack? In a lot of Europe (certainly UK, I heard also France), you can only buy 16 pills (about 8g) at a time, unless your doctor writes you a ticket. The pills themselves may contain a lot of chemical, but the whole pack doesn't contain enough grams for a successful impulsive suicide. You would need to go to a second drug store, by which time you'd probably decide not to do it. Hence the reduction in death rate. The problem of liver damage due to chronic over use continues .

seszett 13y ago
Right, I had not thought about this aspect of things, both the 500mg and 1g tubes I have at home contain a total of only 8g. It doesn't seem difficult to accumulate more than 8g at home over time though, I'm not a big consumer of these and I have 12g at home, in three tubes. I remember my grand parents having a lot more packs at their place.

jonnathanson 13y ago

It's not the dosage per pill that's unsafe; it's the concentration over a period of time. Acetaminophen builds up in the system. I'd venture to guess that most acetaminophen/paracetamol users aren't popping Tylenol (etc.) every four hours for weeks at a time. But four Vicodin pills a day, taken over the course of a week or two -- not an unusual dosage for pain relief from major surgery or illness -- will concentrate an extremely large amount of acetaminophen in your system, because acetaminophen is eliminated fairly slowly from the body (and at great cost to the liver). You're probably not going to kill yourself taking that much acetaminophen. I've done it a few times, and I'm still here. But you might do some serious, potentially irreversible damage to your liver. It's sort of like heavy metal poisoning: it takes a lot to get an acutely toxic dose, but a slowly toxic dose can accumulate over time.