Well given "therapeutic index" I had said "medication" as opposed to "commonly abused substances". I think your list skews heavily due to psychedelics tending not to be acutely toxic to the same extent as other chemical species.

Statins for example are probably 10x to 20x (quick napkin math based on an animal study I found). Tylenol is 10x and is OTC.

Personally I consider alcohol to be much safer than many other substances given the form it typically takes. Utterly irresponsible binge drinking aside, most people will suffer serious adverse effects long before they're in danger. Compare that with pills or injections where an OD can be entirely inadvertent even when observing basic common sense.

Two things:

1. Half of those drugs on the list do have medicinal uses.

Even methamphetamine and cocaine are used medicinally (admittedly rarely).

2. Tylenol poisoning is the leading reason for poison control center calls.

>80,000 U.S. Poison Control exposure cases in 2021 involving acetaminophen or an acetaminophen-containing product.

https://poisoncenters.org/news-alerts/13244374

7-Up contained lithium citrate until 1950. The soda jerks were literally treating manic depression during WWII. There were advertising signs for it at crosswalks on city streets. Make 7-Up Yours, Baby!

Any product that contains ethanol but is not intended for consumption will be adulterated with ingredients that make it really unpleasant to consume. Any drug, OTC or sometimes even prescription, that has a risk of abuse, will be combined with another drug that makes it impractical or dangerous to use it recreationally, or isolate it for manufacturing.

So the next time you wonder why all your cough medicine has to come with guaifenesin, or you need a psychiatrist to prescribe your lithium carbonate, you can blame all the addicts and Walter Whites out there who ruined it for honest people.

By the way, Wikipedia attempts to contradict the claim about 7Up containing lithium citrate and says it was never an ingredient. There is no source supporting this claim. An unreliable source, by "Bill Lockhart and Bob Brown" never makes any claim about 7Up's ingredients, but focuses on weirdly-long names that had never been used by the company.

On the contrary, multiple sources insist that lithium citrate was in 7Up for decades, and in fact that the FDA had banned this usage in 1948, and that is why it was removed! If it was never in 7Up to begin with, it seems odd to ban a thing that wasn't going on!

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/7up/

https://medium.com/wise-well/lithium-the-nonessential-elemen...

> an acetaminophen-containing product

Careful because that's some opioids as well.