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> you can buy paracetamol in packs of 200? jeez. isn't this one of the main killers, though overdoses (many accidental)?

Do you (or anyone else) have some concrete data for incidence rate of fatal overdoses in the U.S.? I'm curious if it's really all that common.

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One study [1] gives these annual numbers: 56,000 emergency room visits, 26,000 hospitalizations, and 458 fatalities. They further estimate about 75% of the fatalities are intentional overdoses, and 25% unintentional. Though I recall reading elsewhere that the majority of the non-fatal cases are accidental overdoses, e.g. from unwittingly taking multiple products that have acetaminophen as a component.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16294364

So, the incidence rate for accidental overdose is something like .048 per hundred thousand persons, compared to murder which is 4.7 per hundred thousand persons. You are 100 times more likely to be murdered than accidentally overdose on Tylenol. I'm not sure why there is so much concern over this?

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