Newbie-Proof charcoal

[RelentlessGarbage]

Charcoal is a tough case. As it stands, it's a very general, low-risk purgative and tox clearing agent. On its own, it's quite nice and helpful, but as you said, it can become a problem if you have multiple drugs in the bloodstream at the same time and you don't want them to get purged. Since I'm a botanist, my best example of this would be trying to make plant splices with either Sunrise or Black venne to make produce full of helpful meds; while it'd be nice to have bananas that contained salycilic acid, atropine, and synaptizine, it'll never be worth doing because you'd have charcoal in the mix as well, which would clear away all of those useful reagents very quickly. (Yes, I have heard that there is a secret technique for removing specific reagents from plants, but most people don't know how to do that, myself included.)

I'd love it if charcoal were more selective in what chems it cleared out. It wouldn't really make any sense as to why charcoal binds to and clears out some chems and not others when you stop to think about it, but this is a video game, so it doesn't really matter. That could also make calomel more valuable as a purgative that clears EVERYTHING, in the rare case that someone is overdosing on medical chems and needs them cleared ASAP.

So yeah, I wouldn't be opposed to your proposed changes. It doesn't affect charcoal as a stand-alone medication, but it makes it less deleterious if it's added to medical treatments while also reducing its effectiveness if administered in that setting.