All drugs should be legal, full stop. And I should be able to get medical drugs on my own, without a permission slip from a doctor I have to convince.

Drug prohibition has caused magnitudes more harm than decriminalization and legalization.

And part of this article is about claims from what is likely inert or mild effect at best. Remember, we used to have amphetamines, pseudoephedrine, and much more potent drugs to alleviate colds and such. But because of the forever-drug-war , we're stuck with substandard crap, and everything good gatekept by doctors.

Dextromethorphan is definitely not a placebo. Take enough and you'll go to space and meet God. Smaller doses produce euphoria and dissociation, which, even if they don't make the cough go away, makes it easier to tolerate a cold -- same reason antitussives have historically contained alcohol, cannabis extract (which may incidentally work as bronchodilator but was not the reason I imagine it was in antitussives)

Funny amphetamine used to be an over the counter cold medicine, which the article doesn't mention despite talking about the meth precursor?

Fine article but these two details stuck out to me while reading it.

Yeah, intentionally misleading consumers should always be at least somewhat illegal. Sure caveat emptor, but consumers having accurate information is implied and a cornerstone of a competitive market.

The more general deeply-entrenched golden goose here is branding, which applies to much more than OTC medicines. Make it so the active ingredients have to be listed prominently - the largest text on the front of the product package - and these concerns diminish greatly.

It would also fix the homeopathic snake oil as well, which has started showing up as options in previously-reputable medicine aisles. So at any rate, be on guard if you don't want to end up accidentally buying a bottle of water plus flavoring in your cold-addled state.

Oral phenylephrine is considered to be ineffective, phenylephrine in a nasal spray is considered effective.

Of course placebos should be legal, they're effective medications.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/the-power-...

> If you walk down the cold and flu aisle at CVS and start looking closely at labels, you will count about 100 products and around six active ingredients

It's so utterly ridiculous how much space the Cold and Flu section of the medicine aisle takes for no reason at all.

And the whole thing about combining so many medications is just silly, especially the marketing for it. "Why take 3 medications for your cold symptoms when you can take just this one?" then gets countered with "Why take a cold medication that has ingredients for symptoms you don't have?"

IMO, DayQuil should never have existed simply for the reasons the article mentions: It leads to people being unaware of what they're taking. Yeah, the label is right there, but you gotta consider the lowest common denominator when selling things to the general public.