I have read that when Jimi Hendrix died he had taken 9 tablets of Vesparax ,a German drug, which amounts to 18 times normal dosage. Why would a drug maker produce tablets that should be cut in half by the consumer? Doctors usually recommend against pill cutting. Was this common at the time? Was it a German thing? It dosen’t seem to make sense, to manufacture pills so much larger than they need to.
Cutting is contra-indicated for time release formulas. Otherwise, it can be cheaper to buy 30 pills and cut in half rather than 60 in the required dose.
Sure, but it would still be odd to only manufacture pills of twice the “normal” dose.
My guess is that what is going on here is false or more likely just misleading reporting. Quite possibly the stuff was prescribed at different dosages for different patients (this is not at all uncommon) so some perfectly legitimate patients may have been taking twice as much (or even more) as others and the manufacturers made the pills at different dosages to accommodate these different needs. Possibly the ones Jimi took were twice the most common dosage, but that does not mean that they were not a “normal” (in the sense of never prescribed) dosage. What killed him, of course, was taking far too many of them at once.
There’s no such thing as a “normal dose” only a “starting dose.”
The idea of a “normal dose” is drug warrior propaganda.
Or even prescribed as “take 2 500mg pills 3xday” in one formulation and “take 1 pill 3xday” when the formulation was 1g, for the exact same need.
I had a job in Scotland where my all-Spaniards team quickly learned that the “basic dosages” sold there were the ones labeled “for children” back home: when our coworkers asked us for pills they always wanted 2 or 3 until we showed them that Spanish pills were 2x or 3x the strength of the ones they were used to. In my coworker Ene’s words, “so that’s why in foreign movies they always take pills by the handful!”
It is indeed not uncommon for pills here in Germany to have a little furrow in them; you can easily break the pill in two along this line without needing a knife or any other tool. I suppose, though, that the usual dose of pills like this is one pill, and the furrow is intended to facilitate taking one and a half if you want a particularly strong dose - whereas two full pills would be too much. I agree that it would be odd to sell drugs in the form of these where the normal dose would be half a pill, rather than making the pills half as large to begin with.
Having to cut pills is very common with veterinary meds… When the patients include both Great Danes and Chihuahuas it is not possible to have one standard dose. Also vet clinics typically supply the meds at the time of visit rather than sending you off with a 'scrip so cutting pills reduces the required inventory.