If a bottle of Tylenol, for example, says something like
"Do not use after June 1998," and it is August 2002,
should you take the Tylenol? Should you discard it?
Can you get hurt if you take it? Will it simply have lost its
potency and do you no good?
In other words, are drug manufacturers being honest with us
when they put an expiration date on their medications, or is
the practice of dating just another drug industry scam, to get
us to buy new medications when the old ones that purportedly
have "expired" are still perfectly good?
mother-in-law recently said to me, "It doesn't mean anything,
" when I pointed out that the Tylenol she was about to take had "expired"
4 years and a few months ago. I was a bit mocking in my
pronouncement -- feeling superior that I had noticed the
chemical corpse in her cabinet -- but she was equally
adamant in her reply, and is generally very sage about medical issues.
of which she took 2 capsules for a pain in the upper back.
About a half hour later she reported the pain seemed to have eased up a bit.
I said, "You could be having a placebo effect," not wanting to simply
concede she was right about the drug,
and also not actually knowing what I was talking about.
we had our evening cocktails and hot tub dip (we were in
"Leisure World," near Laguna Beach, California, where the
hot tub is bigger than most Manhattan apartments, and
"Heaven," as generally portrayed, would be raucous by comparison).
immediately scoured the medical databases and general literature
for the answer to my question about drug expiration labellings.
And voila, no sooner than I could say "Screwed again by
the pharmaceutical industry," I had my answer.
Here are the simple facts:
beginning in 1979, specifies only the date the manufacturer
guarantees the full potency and safety of the drug -- it does
not mean how long the drug is actually "good" or safe to use.
drugs past their expiration date -- no matter how "expired"
the drugs purportedly are. Except for possibly the rarest of
exceptions, you won't get hurt and you certainly won't get killed.
over time, from as little as 5% or less to 50% or more
(though usually much less than the latter). Even 10 years after the
"expiration date," most drugs have a good deal of their original potency.
One of the largest studies ever conducted that supports the
above points about "expired drug" labelling was done by
the US military 15 years ago, according to a feature story in the]
Wall Street Journal (March 29, 2000), reported by Laurie P. Cohen.
The military was sitting on a $1 billion stockpile of drugs and
facing the daunting process of destroying and replacing its
supply every 2 to 3 years, so it began a testing program to see if
it could extend the life of its inventory.
ultimately covered more than 100 drugs, prescription and
over-the-counter.
effective as far as 15 years past their expiration date.
Francis Flaherty, said he concluded that expiration dates
put on by manufacturers typically have no bearing on whether
a drug is usable for longer.
that a drug is still good on whatever expiration date the company
chooses to set. The expiration date doesn't mean, or even suggest,
that the drug will stop being effective after that, nor that it will become harmful.
rather than scientific, reasons, " said Mr. Flaherty, a pharmacist at
the FDA until his retirement in 1999.
They want turnover."
which is weighted toward drugs used during combat, to conclude
most drugs in consumers' medicine cabinets are potent beyond
the expiration date.
said that with a handful of exceptions -- notably nitroglycerin,
insulin, and some liquid antibiotics -- most drugs are probably as
durable as those the agency has tested for the military.
take a product you have at home and keep it for many years."
Consider aspirin. Bayer AG puts 2-year or 3-year dates on aspirin
and says that it should be discarded after that.
aspirin, said the dating is "pretty conservative"; when Bayer has
tested 4-year-old aspirin, it remained 100% effective, he said.
So why doesn't Bayer set a 4-year expiration date? Because the company
often changes packaging, and it undertakes "continuous
improvement programs,"
testing, and testing each time for a 4-year life would be impractical.
Bayer has never tested aspirin beyond 4 years, Mr. Allen said.
But Jens Carstensen has.
pharmacy school, who wrote what is considered the main text on
drug stability, said,
"I did a study of different aspirins, and after 5 years, Bayer was still excellent”.
medicine chest to ease the nausea I'm feeling from calculating how many
billions of dollars the pharmaceutical industry bilks out of unknowing
consumers every year who discard perfectly good drugs and buy
new ones because they trust the industry's "expiration date labelling."
By Richard Altschuler
