alt Hacker News> So the only ingredient that’s doing anything in that bottle of DayQuil makes up just 2% of the bottle: the roughly 8 grams of acetaminophen
this argument makes very little sense. Plenty of very potent drugs are in the single digit mg range in a tablet that weights hundreds of mg.
More importantly, as always, it is a problem of incentives. There is no strong, commercial entity focused on removing ineffective drugs from the market, but plenty of commercial pressure to keep them. The FDA has zero incentive to clean house. The magic hand of the market is supposed to be consumers choosing not to buy these drugs because they are ineffective, but for many reasons (choice, placebo effect, basic scientific literacy) this does not happen.
I don't know what the most effective entity is. I cannot personally imagine a commercial structure to support this, but perhaps one could be built.
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The other ingredients would be doing other things: making the pill/drug easer to swallow/consume, extending shelf-life, etc. You need enough of the drug for it to be effective, but not too much to overdose or exhibit side-effects.
The mass of the acetominophen isn't really important, it's just vivid writing. The point is that 8g is obtainable for orders of magnitude less when it isn't wrapped in misleading marketing.