Beer, wine, booze, tobacco, and vapes are obvious, but things like cough medicine (dextromethorphan), diarrhea pills (loperamide), little roses in neat glass tubes, and air dusters (let's kill some brain cells!) are perhaps less-obvious.

The bodega wants to be associated with being the place where a person can stop in and buy anything, from a can of soup to a pair of pants.

I once asked why levothyrox, a drug to compensate a dying thyroid, is so regulated (at least in France). It's not like it's psychotic or something, it is just a hormone. Turns out people were buying it expecting weight loss...

It's because of such idiots that people whose life is already complicated gets it even more.

And that's not a result of regulation (anyone can buy as much as they want), but is rather a result of stock shrink. It tends to disappear in some less-than-savory neighborhoods.

(I use loperamide occasionally for its main intended purpose of settling my gut down enough that I can do something other than hang out near a bathroom while I quickly dehydrate, and more than once it has been legitimately hard to find in some areas when I've needed to buy more.)

News to me as well