[Nursie]

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.

[brainwad]

> 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.

[Nursie]

The point is that many don't really want to. Those that actually want to can buy two boxes from two shops or ask the pharmacist for the big pack from behind the counter.

This just adds a tiny amount of friction to impulsive attempts, which may be a classic cry for help or just someone in the depths of some sort of mental health episode. Such folks may think better of it the next day and a very small amount of inconvenience will put them off. I think suicide is serious enough that you should probably mean it, and societally saying 'think twice about this' is a good thing.

On the idea that it just shift deaths, as your sibling poster points out (from the UK) -

"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."

https://www.psych.ox.ac.uk/research/research-groups/csr/rese...

So it looks like this tiny, tiny barrier does actually deter people. And that definitely points to them not really being sold on it in any rational way.

[brainwad]

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.

[Nursie]

> 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"

[zimpenfish]

> 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...