It feels like better linking of data would help a lot here. It's weird that wide scale web scraping isn't used as an intelligence source for things like this. (It can be done in a way that weakly preserves anonymity of innocent victims; and the data should be destroyed after prosecution).<p>> <i>They are running a high risk: Dozens of Reumofan users have suffered serious and sometimes life-threatening health effects after taking the pills, including liver injury, strokes and severe episodes of bleeding, according to federal records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.</i><p>On first reading it's easy to say these people are stupid, taking this ridiculous medication when there are proper meds around.<p>Pain control and pain medication is weird. People sometimes overdose with proper meds, leaving themselves open to similar very dangerous side effects.<p>Some of the meds are old, from a time when testing wasn't as good and understanding of pain was poor. See coproxamol as an example - this med contains 325 mg of paracetamol (therapeutic dose is 1000 mg per dose) and the weak opioid dextropropoxyphene. Coproxamol was widely used in the UK by people completing suicide. The dextropropoxyphene is very toxic, especially if combined with alcohol. And people taking the med long term would increase the dose because of tolerance to the opioid, thus risking liver toxicity from paracetamol overdosing.<p>But, despite clear evidence that this med is dangerous, and no more effective than a normal dose of paracetamol alone, there was a lot of campaigning around its withdrawal, with people worried that they would not find a suitable replacement.<p>We have better pain management now, but it's still tricky to get people the right pain relief.