The war on drugs is useless and counter-productive

(written by Lawrence Krubner, however indented passages are often quotes)

Interesting:

in the early days of the misguided and counterproductive war on drugs, Richard Nixon signed the Drug Control Act that established “schedules” that doctors and patients must deal with today. The schedules range from IV to I, in order of their “abuse potential”. Now, just so you don’t get confused and think this had something to do with safety, chemotherapy agents, warfarin and other very dangerous drugs are not on the schedule, but pretty much any drug someone might take at a party is. It was decided that drugs should be made more difficult to obtain based on their potential for “abuse”. In keeping with the moralistic and authoritarian origins of all this, “abuse” means “getting high” and has little to do with how dangerous the given drug was to your health. Some drugs, like cannabis, are schedule I and legally unavailable by anyone in most states. Does anyone think cannabis is deadlier than Jim Beam?

That is how you end up with unnecessary acetaminophen in your narcotic. The government figures it has a lower potential for abuse because you will be dissuaded from taking enough of it to “get high’ by the potential for hepatotoxicity due to the added acetaminophen! The manufacturer responds to the incentives of the Drug Control act by adding the acetaminophen to get a schedule III classification. This makes it less onerous for the prescribing physician, and easier for the patient, resulting in greater sales for the drug company.

Make the potential party drug more toxic so it is less likely to be “abused”.

In case you think my reasoning on this is overly cynical, have you ever purchased denatured alcohol at the hardware store? This is ethanol – the same kind found in your gin and tonic – which has been purposefully engineered to kill you if you drink it. “Denatured” implies there has been some chemical alteration of the alcohol, but in fact it is just intentionally contaminated with toxic solvents like methanol or acetone. The manufacturer goes to extra effort and expense to add poison with the sole purpose of escaping burdensome government regulation and taxation.