The combo drug grift is dangerous -
Eli RichmanIf 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.