(Disclaimer – I am not a doctor and nothing on this page is professional medical opinion – just observations from a reasonably intelligent individual who has been reading up on this current event – I invite doctors and others to feel free to chime in on my opinion here in the comments, and correct any inaccuracies contained within!)

It looks like the FDA is poised to ban the painkillers Percocet (essentially Oxycodone with Acetaminophen) and Vicodin (Hydrocodone with Acetaminophen) because they both contain Acetaminophen.

Acetaminophen has been proven to cause liver damage, and is the leading cause of Acute Liver Failure in the United States.

Smart of the FDA to take this action then, right?

Yes!

From what I understand, if doctors need to prescribe Percocet in the future, they can simply prescribe Oxycontin and Tylenol separately, or other Oxycodone compounds. Similarly, in place of Vicodin, they could prescribe other Hydrocodone compounds with other drugs, such as Ibuprofen.

However, unlike Oxycodone, doctors cannot prescribe Hydrocodone by itself plus a Tylenol prescription separately.

This is because in the US, you cannot prescribe Hydrocodone without it being combined with another drug.

Why Hydrocodone is not available without other drugs such as Acetaminophen is the dark side of this story.

Up until now, the FDA has prohibited Hydrocodone (the opiate in Vicodin), from being sold in the United States *unless* it is combined with another drug as a compound – far and away, Acetaminophen being the most popular (and most dangerous).

The question is why did the government insist that, unlike the more powerful opiate Oxycodone (which is available standalone, as Oxycontin), Hydrocodone not be prescribed by itself?

From my amateur research around the net, the answer seems to be some unusually sinister legislation originating from The War On Drugs.

In some patients, Hydrocodone can be habit-forming, and its a popular drug of abuse. The FDA wanted to make sure there was something else in the drug that people *wouldn’t* want to take too much of to discourage abuse.

Introducing Acetaminophen.

Its been known since 1970’s that too much Acetaminophen causes the unwanted side effects such as stomach upset and liver damage. So the FDA figured if that was in there too, people wouldn’t want to take too much of it.

Basically, for all intents and purposes, the FDA made an important and popular drug more harmful to discourage abuse.

Besides the fact that this was completely unethical and has probably resulted in the unnecessary liver damage and deaths of countless Americans (the vast majority legitimately ill patients to begin with), there is yet one more irony to this approach:

Many Vicodin users and addicts likely have no idea whatsoever that the government put Acetaminophen in there in the first place, nor what the reason and consequences of the Acetaminophen component are.

In other words, instead of being dissuaded from abusing the drug as intended, most Vicodin users were likely just thoughtlessly destroying their liver.

Now, if your a drug addict, I’m sure you know that drug addiction can have serious consequences on your health and perhaps even cause death – the insidious point is that the devastating liver damage they were experiencing was a conscious and deliberate act of the US government, and not intrinsic to their addiction.

Of course, there are some savvy Vicodin addicts who know how (and why) to chemically remove the Acetaminophen before taking Vicodin (and why they should), but the complexity probably makes this a tiny and fortunate minority.

Now, this isn’t to say that up until now Vicodin would not have been a popular compound with doctors anyway even without the government ban (its very effective as a combination) – plus, Hydrocodone is available as a compound with other alternate drugs besides Acetaminophen as well (such as Ibuprofen).

The real problem is all of the people who destroyed their liver who might have otherwise been prescribed Hydrocodone standalone (as Oxycontin is today), and all of the drug addicts who destroyed their liver with Acetaminophen because there is absolutely no standalone Hydrocodone available on the black market.

In a sense, Acetaminophen was used similarly to the way the government used Paraquat on Marijuana farms – stop people abusing drugs by making them poisonous.