Small hurdles can lead to great things

Back in 2019, the European Union enacted a portion of their “Falsified Medicines Directive” that required most prescription drugs to be given in the form of blister packs instead of a simple bottle. As the name implies, the core reasoning was to help prevent tampering of those medicines.

It also had a pleasant side effect of reducing suicide. Shared by Tom Scott in this podcast:

“It’s quite a bleak reason, but they’re not legal over here because banning those big kind of easy-to-open jars has reduced the suicide rate. Because if you don’t have the ability to have 100 pills without popping ’em out of a blister pack, you are less likely to… you know?”

As shared by an earlier article in the New York Times, these packages not only help reduce suicide, but also can help prevent accidental poisoning of children:

“Not only can blister packs reduce suicide attempts by adults, but also poisonings of children. After the Food and Drug Administration required blister packaging for iron pills, which cause poisoning death in young children, the number of iron-ingestion calls to poison control centers in the country dropped by about 33 percent and the number of deaths went almost to zero.“

As they share in the article though, cost prevented most companies from making this change voluntarily, hence the EU creating a law that required it.

I’m not here to advocate for blister packs in the US, though it seems it would be a good idea…