Acetaminophen, the killer drug anyone can buy, under fire in Canada

Is America the last country refusing to act on Tylenol?

People shouldn’t have to die before a law changes.

But that’s exactly what’s happening right now.

For years I’ve been sharing stories of people who lost their lives thanks to Tylenol and other acetaminophen products. People like Marcus Trunk, who I first told you about a decade ago.

He died after his liver shut down from taking acetaminophen for a sprained wrist.

Or Ashley Campbell who was still a teen when acetaminophen destroyed her liver. She spent three agonizing days in a Canadian hospital before she died.

Ashley was just one of the victims we learned about from a Toronto Star investigation last year that looked into the dangers of acetaminophen.

Now Canada’s national health agency is getting ready to make major changes to how acetaminophen is bought, sold and marketed. And when they do, there will be only one country in the entire western world that’s doing nothing to protect its citizens from this proven killer.

And, surprise, surprise, it’s our own Big Pharma dictatorship — the U.S. of A.

“They don’t tell you it can kill”Ashley Campbell’s father, Chuck, had been a policeman for 25 years. But he says he never knew that “regular strength, over-the-counter, buy it by the bushel load, Tylenol” could kill.

And he’s not alone. For years now, I’ve been warning you how acetaminophen can cause permanent damage to everything from your liver to your heart.

But Canada and the U.S. are still the only two western countries that have practically no restrictions on how much acetaminophen you can buy or take. And that may be starting to change — in Canada, at least.

The Toronto Star’s exposé that uncovered thousands of ER visits and hundreds of accidental deaths linked to acetaminophen caused such an outrage that Health Canada is getting ready to act.

It’s talking about lowering the maximum recommended dosage of acetaminophen, requiring that the drug be sold in smaller doses, and even launching a public health campaign to warn citizens about the med’s dangers.

And when that happens, we’ll practically be the only developed country on the planet that’s not even trying to keep its people safe from acetaminophen.

Our government refusing to lift a finger to protect us from dangerous drugs. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

In Australia, New Zealand and Ireland, for example, you can only buy acetaminophen in pharmacies. And in countries like France, Germany and Switzerland, there are limits on how many pills can be sold at a time.

But in the U.S., any kindergartner with a $10 bill can walk into a gas station from New Mexico to New York and buy a 100-pill bottle, no questions asked.

The FDA has been so useless at sounding the alarm on acetaminophen that it took 32 years for a warning about liver damage to appear on bottles. And the agency still recommends a daily maximum dose of 4,000 mg. that’s so high that even McNeil — the company that invented Tylenol and started this whole mess — says you should take less!

And while the FDA looks the other way, here’s just some of the damage acetaminophen is causing every single year:

100,000 calls to poison control centers, due to overdoses and side effects. Even the National Institutes of Health admits that acetaminophen poisoning is practically a national epidemic.
56,000 emergency room visits. And lots of those patients have suffered severe, irreversible and life-threatening organ damage.
Hundreds of senseless deaths. The CDC claims there were 1,600 acetaminophen deaths over a 10-year period. But many deaths never get reported, so that’s probably a small drop in a very large bucket.

“They tell you it’s medicine. They don’t tell you it can kill you,” said David Baumle, whose 12-year-old son died just days after Christmas one year after taking a Tylenol sore throat syrup.

It’s clearly up to us to protect ourselves. But what makes acetaminophen especially dangerous is that you can find it in OTC and prescription medications that go by lots of different names.

So it can be easy to take a dangerous dose without ever realizing it.

Fortunately, an organization called KnowYourDose has a great list of meds that all have acetaminophen as an active ingredient. You can learn what they are — and what to avoid — by clicking here.

Sources:

“Health Canada takes action on potential danger of acetaminophen” Rachel Mendleson, Robert Cribb, July 10, 2015, The Toronto Star, thestar.com

“The dark side of acetaminophen” Jennifer Yang, Robert Cribb, February 21, 2014, The Toronto Star, thestar.com