Beer, wine, booze, tobacco, and vapes are obvious, but things like cough medicine (dextromethorphan), diarrhea pills (loperamide), little roses in neat glass tubes, and air dusters (let's kill some brain cells!) are perhaps less-obvious.
The bodega wants to be associated with being the place where a person can stop in and buy anything, from a can of soup to a pair of pants.
I once asked why levothyrox, a drug to compensate a dying thyroid, is so regulated (at least in France). It's not like it's psychotic or something, it is just a hormone. Turns out people were buying it expecting weight loss...
It's because of such idiots that people whose life is already complicated gets it even more.
News to me as well
And that's not a result of regulation (anyone can buy as much as they want), but is rather a result of stock shrink. It tends to disappear in some less-than-savory neighborhoods.
(I use loperamide occasionally for its main intended purpose of settling my gut down enough that I can do something other than hang out near a bathroom while I quickly dehydrate, and more than once it has been legitimately hard to find in some areas when I've needed to buy more.)