Should DayQuil be legal? - by Eli Richman - The Argument

The combo drug grift is dangerous - Eli Richman

If you walk down the cold and flu aisle at CVS and start looking closely at labels, you will count about

• 100 products and around 
• six active ingredients. 

This is the meat and potatoes of the over-the-counter drug industry, which specializes in taking three generic medications and two placebos that cost 5 cents each individually and selling the combination product for $35.

• Take your standard 12-ounce bottle of DayQuil, which costs around $15 at CVS. The entire bottle contains a small amount of acetaminophen (Tylenol) and two other ingredients that are supposed to help with your cough and congestion — dextromethorphan and phenylephrine — but in reality do nothing...
  

So the only ingredient that’s doing anything in that bottle of DayQuil makes up just 2% of the bottle: the roughly 8 grams of acetaminophen, which separately would run you about 16 cents at Costco. 

Even if you opted for the $10 store-brand version of DayQuil, that’s more than a 6,000% markup rate...