Re:Man dies after self-medicating with chloroquine
by refurb on Monday March 23, 2020 @08:09PM
(#22670371)
I missed the "some of which are OTC". My mistake.
You are correct that there is a "gray market" for some compounds. The FDA won't come after you for selling lithium carbonate as long as you're not touting it as a medicine. I assume that if it became widespread enough and people got injured, those products would be pulled off the market pretty quickly.
My comments of the TI for acetaminophen was more that it was larger than that for chloroquine. No drug is "safe", but some are safer than others.
Two points on the topic of OTC drugs in the US:
1. Unfortunately you can buy Lithium as a supplement in the US. I have seen bottles of it for sale on Amazon.
2. Having seen enough accidental (not to mention intentional) overdoses from Acetaminophen, I wouldn't be so fast to act like the therapeutic index is wide enough to be treated as "safe". Anything with a narrow therapeutic window needs to be weighed carefully before use. I hope your take away from my comment wasn't that I think chloroquine is "safe": merely that there are a lot of drugs with narrow windows, and there are trade-offs associated with their use. I included that paper because it discusses this very explicitly.