The Italian Medicines Agency (AIFA) has discovered, with the thunder of a biblical verdict, that adolescents are abusing paracetamol. A significant number of intentional overdose cases, they write. Irreversible effects, they warn. Then they recommend that parents monitor, teachers inform, and doctors prescribe with parsimony. Beautiful choreography, admirable concern.
Too bad no one, in this theater of public health, has the courage to ask why a sixteen-year-old swallows a handful of white tablets hoping never to wake up again. Why no one names the burning word: the loneliness of a generation sold to profit, forgotten by fathers, betrayed by institutions.
Paracetamol, experts repeat, is a safe drug if used with caution. Safe like a kitchen knife in the hands of a child starving for attention. Pharmaceutical companies have made it available on every shelf, in every drawer, in every handbag. They have advertised it as the gentle remedy for headaches, minor muscle aches, and cold fevers. Never a word on the risks of overdose, never a clear warning on liver damage, never a campaign that wasn’t a leaflet written in such small print it seemed a visual acuity test. The pain industry, which bills billions selling the promise of a life without discomfort, has created a monster and now pretends to be surprised that the monster is hungry.
AIFA and the WHO, for their part, have the task of monitoring. And they monitor, in the sense that they look at the data, analyze it, comment on it. Then they issue notes, publish guidelines, organize conferences. But they do not touch the capital, they do not brush against power, they do not question the system that makes paracetamol a commodity like french fries and cans of Coca-Cola. Pharmaceutical multinationals have learned the lesson: better soft regulation that leaves room for the market, better an alarm now and then to show that someone cares. The rest is cinema.
The true emergency is not paracetamol. It is the void that young people try to fill with extreme gestures. It is the school that does not listen, the family that is absent, the psychologist who costs too much, the future that has turned into a threat. Today’s adolescents have grown up with the pandemic, wars, climate change, economic uncertainty, and the disintegration of bonds. Their myths are influencers selling anxiety as if it were perfume; their idols are footballers who earn in a month what a worker never sees in a lifetime. In this desert of meaning, swallowing a handful of tablets is a scream. A scream that regulatory agencies only hear to compile statistics.
AIFA writes that cases of intentional overdose have not increased over time, that there is no evidence of imitative behavior or social challenges. Perhaps they have not understood that the worst evil is precisely the normality of these gestures. There is no viral phenomenon; there is an endemic condition. Young people hurt themselves with the same naturalness as their fathers got drunk at the bar. Instead of questioning this drift, experts focus on the drug. As if changing the poison could make one forget the despair.
The health dictatorship spoken of so much is not made of mandatory vaccines or green passes. It is made of a system that has medicalized suffering, transforming every discomfort into a disorder to be cured with a pill. Paracetamol has become the aspirin of the third millennium: you take it for a headache, you take it for heartbreak, you take it for the pain of living. Pharmaceutical companies have profited from this confusion, and regulatory agencies have looked the other way. Then, when young people die or end up in intensive care, the ritual performance of “we must do more” begins.
An era that cannot offer its youth anything but anxiolytics and analgesics is a failed era. An era that discovers drug abuse only when the numbers become too high to ignore is a hypocritical era. The young people who swallow paracetamol today are not sick in the liver. They are sick with loneliness, fear, and a lack of prospects. And no pill, however powerful, can ever cure a generation that has stopped believing it is worth getting up in the morning.
Pharmaceutical companies will continue to produce, AIFA to monitor, the WHO to recommend. Young people will continue to hurt themselves. And we, distracted spectators of this shipwreck, will continue to be surprised that an over-the-counter analgesic can kill more than a car.
Until we have the courage to look the true cause of this silent epidemic in the face, every alarm will remain a fig leaf over collective shame. And paracetamol, poor innocent drug, will continue to serve as a scapegoat for a society that no longer has the courage to call things by their names.
RVSCB
Bibliography
- AIFA (Italian Medicines Agency), Information Note on the Use of Paracetamol in Adolescents, May 7, 2026, available on the Agency’s website.
- Pavia Poison Control Center, Annual Report on Drug Overdose Cases in Pediatric and Adolescent Age Groups, Pavia, 2025.
- WHO (World Health Organization), Guidelines for the Appropriate Use of Non-Opioid Analgesics, Geneva, 2023.
- Illich, I., Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health (original: Némésis médicale), trans. C. Ripa di Meana, Mondadori, Milan, 1976 (Chapter III on social iatrogenesis).
- Benvenuti, M., “Paracetamol and Risk Culture,” in Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, Vol. 42, No. 2, 2024, pp. 87–102.
- Reich, W., The Function of the Orgasm (original: Die Funktion des Orgasmus), trans. E. Capriolo, SugarCo, Milan, 1972 (on the relationship between psychic suffering and somatization).
- Hessel, S., Indignez-vous! (original: Indignez-vous!), trans. C. Rinaudo, La Biblioteca di Repubblica, Rome, 2010 (on the necessity of reacting to conformism).
Archive Note: RVSCB – Archive of Uncomfortable Truths, May 7, 2026 “I am not interested in being loved. I am interested in being read after they have hated me.”
