The vast majority of adults should be able to live in a world where they're not treated like 10-year-old children for seeking a bit of modest pain relief for very common ailments.

There were over 50,000 hospital emergency room visits, yes. However, bear in mind that many thousands of people visit emergency rooms for all kinds of unfounded reasons every year anyhow. Of those 50,000+ paracetamol-related visits (speaking of the United States here), less than 5% resulted in any need for hospitalization and only 450 or so deaths were registered in 2023, as a recent example year. These numbers out of an estimated 60 million individual uses PER WEEK by Americans according to the NIH.

For some perspective, accidents caused by "Fall involving ice-skates, skis, roller-skates or skateboards" in the U.S cause an average of 1000+ deaths per year.

Paracetamol can, just like many drugs, be dangerous, but if your criteria for paranoid restriction of something so commonly necessary and used without problems in the extreme absolute vast majority of cases are the numbers above, you'd better start banning one enormous shit list of completely innocuous activities and things that normal adults have access to before you reach something like paracetamol.

There seems to be a sort of mental illness prevalent in the kind of logic that equates any evidence of self-harm with a given product or thing with a rabid need to treat people like children in their access to it.

The entire adult population should not have to be treated like drooling morons in their very most basic personal medical choices because a completely minuscule percentage of the population lacks the mental capacity to read a basic safety label for a common medicine, or control their childrens' access to something that's easy to keep away from them.

> In adults, single doses above 10 grams or 200 mg/kg of bodyweight, whichever is lower, have a reasonable likelihood of causing toxicity.

10g is 20 pills of the highest strength you'll find in a regular store. Excedrin brand "Extra Strength" is half of that, you'd have to be eating 40+ pills in 24 hours, or 20+ pills per day on multiple consecutive days. Most acetaminophen pills have 100-200 mg of the active ingredient.

You're missing the context:

> Intentional overdosing (self-poisoning, with suicidal intent) is frequently implicated in paracetamol toxicity.[25] In a 2006 review, paracetamol was the most frequently ingested compound in intentional overdosing.[26]

So, it's not that acetaminophen will kill that easily. It's just that of the easily available ways to kill yourself, it's distinctly the one that destroys the liver quick.