Almost all of the drugs I have in my cabinet are expired, and all have been 100% potent as the day I got it when I needed to take it years later. I have known this for a long time. There is also a reason the expiration date on your prescriptions is exactly one year after you get it from the pharmacy, when those bottles are actually sitting in a different bottle for months and months at the pharmacy. The entire reason for a 1 year expiration date is money.
The Myth of Drug Expiration Dates
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Re: The Myth of Drug Expiration Dates
#32I always assumed that the expiration date was partly legal, in the way that you only have 1 year within which you can legally have the drug in your system. I mean, if I am prescribed oxycontin, can I legally have the drug in my system for the rest of my life?
I always assumed that the expiration date was partly legal, in the way that you only have 1 year within which you can legally have the drug in your system.
Are you implying that you still hold this assumption and are looking for someone to convince you otherwise? If so, I can't even conceive of where you got this idea in the first place, let alone argue against it. Let's slap a little Occam's Razor on this: how would you even begin to enforce this?
Re: The Myth of Drug Expiration Dates
#33The cynic in me suspects that if this gains too much traction, drug manufacturers will simply start adding self destruct compounds to all of their formulations "for our safety". In fact, some of them have track records of such "ethical" behavior, it wouldn't even surprise me if they turned them poisonous vs simply inactivating them.
The only solution is to fix the economic incentives so that drug manufacturers want to make less wasteful medicines. Same with preventing planned obsolescence. The only solution is to encourage more competition.
Or we could just make it illegal. Then again, with today's political climate it wouldn't surprise me if someone was unironically opposed to regulating drug manufacturers.
Re: The Myth of Drug Expiration Dates
#34> The findings surprised both researchers: A dozen of the 14 compounds were still as potent as they were when they were manufactured, some at almost 100 percent of their labeled concentrations. What kind of reporting is this? Anything less than 100% is not "as potent as when manufactured", and the sentence implies some of those dozen weren't close to 100%. > The idea that drugs expire on specified dates goes back at…
I work for a company that has some periphery exposure to FDA-regulation, and as a result we have to do a lot of very similar scientific calculations to satisfy their archival records. A big part of why most medicines still expire (at least for medicines available over the counter) much earlier than they should is that a majority of the testing is done to determine the expiration date at a controlled temperature, pressure, and humidity.
They test how it degrades under stress to determine a maximum viability under perfectly stable conditions. They are not accounting for the typical medicine storage places: a bathroom cabinet where the temperature and humidity will vary wildly within a matter of minutes, a cool, damp fridge, or even the reading table next to your bed-- constantly exposed to UV light from the windows.
I'm relaying this secondhand from a former FDA contractor, but I can only surmise that for a company with the litagative risk level that any pharmaceutical entity incurs, the old adage of "Better Safe Than Sorry" is a major part of the story that's missing here.
Re: The Myth of Drug Expiration Dates
#35I always assumed that the expiration date was partly legal, in the way that you only have 1 year within which you can legally have the drug in your system. I mean, if I am prescribed oxycontin, can I legally have the drug in my system for the rest of my life?
I think it is legal in that the real expiration date is guaranteed to lie after the date on the box.
The myth is that "lie after" should be read as "equals", which is often far from the truth apparently.
Re: The Myth of Drug Expiration Dates
#36I always assumed that the expiration date was partly legal, in the way that you only have 1 year within which you can legally have the drug in your system. I mean, if I am prescribed oxycontin, can I legally have the drug in my system for the rest of my life?
I'm pretty sure it's never illegal to have a drug in your system (besides something secondary like a DUI). It's only possession that's illegal.
Depends on the country. In Sweden it's illegal to have certain drugs in your system. E.g. if THC is found in your blood you can be convicted for a minor drug offense. We're sadly pretty extreme with regards to drugs though.
Re: The Myth of Drug Expiration Dates
#37> The findings surprised both researchers: A dozen of the 14 compounds were still as potent as they were when they were manufactured, some at almost 100 percent of their labeled concentrations. What kind of reporting is this? Anything less than 100% is not "as potent as when manufactured", and the sentence implies some of those dozen weren't close to 100%. > The idea that drugs expire on specified dates goes back at…
I think it would introduce a huge amount of legal liability to guess that a drug would survive on a shelf for 10 years based on 6 months of testing. Especially if it's something critical like an EpiPen or cancer med.
At the end of the day, there's no really reliable way to speed up time, and it would be a waste of time to add 10 years to a drug development timeline just so you can leave it on a shelf for 10 years to test if it still works.
And yeah, we could probably go through and retroactively test some Ibuprofin, but also remember that these drugs are repackaged / reformulated slightly every couple years for various reasons, and without a lot of legal protections, no company will consider it worth it to guess about drug lifetime.
Re: The Myth of Drug Expiration Dates
#38> The findings surprised both researchers: A dozen of the 14 compounds were still as potent as they were when they were manufactured, some at almost 100 percent of their labeled concentrations. What kind of reporting is this? Anything less than 100% is not "as potent as when manufactured", and the sentence implies some of those dozen weren't close to 100%. > The idea that drugs expire on specified dates goes back at…
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Re: The Myth of Drug Expiration Dates
#39I always assumed that the expiration date was partly legal, in the way that you only have 1 year within which you can legally have the drug in your system. I mean, if I am prescribed oxycontin, can I legally have the drug in my system for the rest of my life?
I'm pretty sure it's never illegal to have a drug in your system (besides something secondary like a DUI). It's only possession that's illegal.
Not really, there are lots of countries having "zero tolerance" policy laws which include ingesting and being under the influence of illegal drugs.
Re: The Myth of Drug Expiration Dates
#40> But neither Cantrell nor Dr. Cathleen Clancy, associate medical director of National Capital Poison Center, a nonprofit organization affiliated with the George Washington University Medical Center, had heard of anyone being harmed by any expired drugs. Cantrell says there has been no recorded instance of such harm in medical literature.
I am more than a little surprised by this. Fanconi syndrome, a kidney disease that can cause bone damage [1], has been repeatedly found in the medical literature to be caused by taking expired pills of the antibiotic tetracycline. [2]
That these people completely failed to remember these cases is distressing at best.
(I heard an interview with the author of this story on NPR Morning Edition today, and also scanned this story webpage. The only mention of tetracycline was by a web commenter on the story.)
[1] https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/000333.htm
[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=tetracycline+fanc...