A reference, not a pharmacy

What this site publishes

Lozenges.com is a reference publication built from two federal datasets: the FDA National Drug Code Directory, and the FDA drug label database. It covers 1,260 products across four oral dosage forms, from 157 labellers, containing 52 distinct active ingredients.

For each product it reports the active ingredient and its strength, the labeller, the dosage form, the marketing category, the National Drug Code, the package sizes on file, and quoted extracts from the product's own Drug Facts panel. Of the 1,260 products, 1,183 carry a label extract.

On top of that spine sit index pages. Each active ingredient has a page listing every product containing it, the strength range actually on the market, and the range the regulation permits where a regulation exists. Each brand and each labeller has a page. Each use has a page, driven by what the labels themselves claim rather than by our own view of what a product is for.

The comparison this makes possible is the one shoppers cannot make in a shop. Two boxes on the same shelf, at different prices, with different packaging, frequently contain the same active ingredient at the same strength. Sometimes they do not. Either way the fact is on the label, and it is now also in a table.

A page exists because a row exists

There is no page on this site that was written by a generator. Every product page exists because there is a row for that product code in the FDA listing, and it shows the fields that row actually contains. Where a field is missing, the page shows nothing rather than a plausible substitute.

That rule has consequences worth stating up front. Some products have no label extract, because FDA holds no matching label record. Some have a strength string that does not parse into a number, so they appear in the product list but not in the strength range for their ingredient. Some are marketing categories nobody can buy: 76 of the listings are bulk ingredients or products supplied for further processing, and those are flagged on the page rather than deleted from it.

The alternative would be to fill the gaps. A reference that fills gaps is not a reference.

What it deliberately does not do

This is a health-adjacent publication and the boundary matters more than the content. The following are not oversights or features waiting to be built. Each is something the site could do and will not.

• It does not recommend a product for a condition. Where a page says a product is for sore throat, that is a report of what the label claims, attributed to the label.
• There is no symptom checker and no tool that takes a description of how you feel and returns a suggestion.
• There is no dosing calculator. Where the regulation states a dose, the regulation is quoted with its citation. Applying it is between you, the package, and a pharmacist.
• There is no interaction checker. Building one would be a different kind of product, subject to a different body of regulation.
• There are no efficacy claims of our own. This site does not tell you whether an ingredient works. It tells you the ingredient is present, at what strength, and what the label and the regulation say about it.
• Prescription products are never presented as a choice. Of the 1,260 listings, 3 are prescription products, and they carry a flag saying so.

Why this subject

A lozenge is the most casually bought drug in the pharmacy. It is sold next to the chewing gum, it costs a few dollars, and almost nobody turns the box over. Yet every one of them is a registered drug product. It has a National Drug Code, a listed active ingredient at a stated strength, a registered labeller, and a Drug Facts panel whose contents are specified by federal regulation.

Shoppers compare these products on packaging: the flavour, the colour, the word on the front of the box. The packaging is the one part of the product that is not regulated for accuracy of comparison. The active ingredient statement is.

There is a second reason. The categories are not what people assume. A menthol cough drop and a nicotine lozenge sit in the same dosage form and look similar in the hand, but one is a monograph product and the other is an approved drug application with a stop-smoking indication. Meanwhile the largest single group in this dataset is not cough drops at all. Putting them in one table makes the differences visible.

How it pays for itself

One way, and it is disclosed at the point of use as well as on the disclosures page. Some pages carry Amazon Associates links to real listings, drawn from Amazon's own catalogue. They are labelled as affiliate links where they appear, and marked rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" in the markup so a search engine is told the same thing you are.

Where a price is shown it carries the date it was retrieved, and the price on Amazon when you buy is the one that applies. Nothing else is invented: a figure we cannot source does not go on a page.

A link can only appear on a product FDA records as an over-the-counter human drug that is available at retail. Prescription products, bulk ingredients, products supplied for further processing and anything on a controlled substance schedule cannot carry one. That gate is written as a whitelist, so a product type nobody anticipated produces no link at all rather than slipping through.

Most pages carry no such link. Where no listing was resolved for a brand, nothing is shown, and no placeholder takes its place.

No manufacturer or labeller pays to appear on this site, pays for a position in any list, or could. The ordering of every table is determined by the data: by product count, by strength, or alphabetically. There is no arrangement under which money could change it, and if one were offered it would be refused. The reasoning is set out in full under disclosures.

When we are wrong

Two kinds of error are possible here: ours, and the source's. We fix ours and date the fix. Where the underlying FDA record is wrong, the correct route is to FDA, and we say so rather than quietly patching a number and creating a third version of reality.

Errors go to hello@lozenges.com. Include the National Drug Code, because it is the only identifier that resolves to exactly one row. The process, and the log, are on the corrections page.