Vice on Tylenol

Prohibition & The Demand for a “Safe” Pill

Tylenols story does not begin with its creation but rather prohibition. Morphinism like refer madness demonized those seeking relief from how they feel. To use medicine to chase away the blues or boredom were socially unacceptable traits of Old America that could not be allowed to continue in the America of this New Deal we live under.

The day the government re founded our social contract based on what we could and could not do for ourselves is the day the story for the hunt for a “safe” pain killer began.

Push, shove, shoot is the prohibitionist way. They tolerated our great grandparents self-medicating, they controlled our parents medicine, and they are banning ours.

By the turn of the twentieth century the United States had already begun to tighten the noose they had laid around our necks a generation before. They had just started to bring Law into Practice through the Harrison Act and the enforcement of shifted traditional medicines from household staples to illicit commodity. Physicians are punished on a sliding scale based on the degree to which they use and talk positively on opioids and plant based medicines currently illegal. So naturally as we have progressed down this progressive path doctors have moved further and further away from helping people with the medicines we know work. The Laws did not end suffering but create it and opened up a new market based on legal gimmicks and snake oils in the pursuit of “Safe” medicine…

The New Deal created New Laws that created opportunity as they tell it. Our story is the other side of that story. The story of the people who paid for it with their lives. Some in death but far more common it costs the lives of the living. Those unable to have a life because they can’t get the medicine or anyone to treat them like anything other than a gold fish at a vet. Those forced to live life in pain, in a bed, chair, couch. Who can’t work when they could with medicine, Can’t play with their kids, clean their homes, sometimes even wipe their ass. Tylenol plays into all this I swear. Im getting to it.

All this despair in the air caused hate for the New Deal and politicians. In a time when patients and doctors were being forced to meet behind the doctors office to get people the medicine they needed the government put out the call for another medicine. Something that did the job of codeine without giving people anything to want when not sick. The political tension created demand for a drug that didn’t smell like an addict or breed headlines. Respectable.

Into this world walked Acetaminophen Carried to market under the little red truck and became the household name it is today. The previous crowned champion of “Safe” medicine.

Created by Harmon Northrop Morse in 1870 then rediscovered and brought to market by McNeil Laboratories as they introduced the product into homes everywhere in the 1950’s. Marketed as a gentle, child-safe fever and pain reducer. The brand spread like fire. Johnson & Johnson later acquired McNeil. It was a victory of marketing and distribution that shifted our view from what was to what was modern and the world thanked them for it.

The world isn’t thanking them now, however. It is coming to light that this stuff is as much a poison as opium except it comes for the young and forgetful than the average man or woman. Our government knew it was poison they simply underestimated it and believed they could use it in the war on drugs to really change things and change things they did. Before I talk to you about Tylenol being mixed with opioids I want to tell you a true story I remember reading somewhere.

There was once a man in America who lived big. Big house, Big business, A Big life. He used laudanum daily and had the money to chase his tolerance. His was a boastful man and spoke often in company of how his daily dose of laudanum could kill an elephant. After hearing this story often and seeing his boss and his boastful ways decided to help himself to a portion of the daily dose. Just a swallow. The man died from it. Im almost certain I read that when researching the temperance movement.

Anyway that is how it is. One mans mortal limit is another’s morning dose. Well the politicians and corporations got together and decided to put an end to this in the most extraordinary way. They decided to add Tylenol to our opioids to set an artificial mortal limit to deter people from breaking the law and using the amount of medicine they needed instead of the little they were allowed. They said no ones dose should be capable of killing anyone who has never taken opioids or opium based medicines like laudanum.

They took away our safe medicines because they had to found the new deal on drug control. Then they had to prohibit and try and erase opium poppies from living memory because no one can want what they have never had or heard of. Corporations that sparked the nations addiction to morphine and laid the ground work and funded the temperance movement have profited every day since trying to produce the fabled “safe” medicine meant to replace the forbidden medicine that makes the New Deal impossible to carry on. This is the MAIN PUBLIC/PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP and one of the very first. A self serving system that perpetuates hopelessness and despair at an ever increasing PROGRESSIVE… rate. I want to be clear this is a eugenics programs designed by the same people who taught Hitler about eugenics. And yes Americans are the ones behind all that and all this.

This story is playing out in front of our eyes. Our government is now saying it is very bad stuff. Even that it itself should be prescription only. I wanted to take this opportunity to tell you a little about it and its role in our world. At least enough to possible get you interested enough to start looking for stories on the ongoing prohibition movements around the world. So If Tylenol is poison what should it be replaced with? Everyone born before 1888 would say poppy tea. What do I know though.