What those numbers really don't get into:

~80% of acetaminophen poisoning cases severe enough to end in hospital are intentional suicide attempts.

Those patients also have better outcomes though: family members know what happened, they get them to a hospital, they can take N-acetylcysteine as a timely antidote.

In the unintentional poisoning group, ~90% is from multi-day accumulation, they don't realize they've been poisoning themselves. They have a much higher rate of acute liver failure and death.

https://doi.org/10.1186/cc1475 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cld.2013.07.001 https://doi.org/10.1097/mcg.0b013e31818a3854

With cost of healthcare, inflation, unemployment, housing crises, wars and whatever else folks have to be thrilled about these days, I am willing to risk assuming alcohol consumption is not going to be on a permanent downward trend. And pain management is far more challenging now than it was 20 years ago, many having no other option beyond NSAIDs for serious problems. That's not hard data, but it is me being quite confident that whatever the numbers were then, won't remain all time highs if they ever were or aspired to be.

Also, I do not work too hard around here, especially with all the corporate aligned types that patrol the area. Folks can do their own research, while they can, before history is rewritten by LLMs and the new internet. Yeah, a lot of articles and papers are getting more difficult to find. And institutional capture is well underway with AI. Newer generations think because they can't find something, it never existed. This is HN, with a karma economy and high price on honesty. I am just leaving occasional marks in the gray zones.