Zeroing In: How to Store Medicine

You wake in the middle of the night to find you’re suffering from an awful headache. You know that going back to sleep is hopeless without a little medical assistance, so you go to the medicine chest and grab some aspirin. As you twist off the cap, you notice the expiration date on the bottle. In your groggy state, you calculate the difference in dates and find – uh oh! – this bottle has been expired for over a year. What now? Is the medicine safe to take? As a pain reliever, is it effective or useless?

The shelf life of most medicines is up for debate. The question becomes even more important in the case of expensive prescription medication, which people pay good money for and throw away once the expiration date has passed.

The expiration date on that bottle of aspirin you’re holding didn’t appear out of thin air. In 1979, a new law required drug manufacturers to add these dates to their products. The date you see represents the length of time that the manufacturer can still promise the drug to be safe and sufficiently effective. Typically, that length of time is about 2 years (or 1 year, if you received the medication directly from a pharmacist). However, studies from the Food and Drug Administration indicate that the vast majority of medicines are still well-preserved for 15 years after the expiration date. In other words, the word expiration in ‘expiration date’ doesn’t so much indicate the expiration of safety; it only stands for the expiration of the manufacturer’s guarantee.

A possible exception is the drug tetracycline. One study from the 1960s asserts that this drug, when degraded by the passage of time, can cause kidney damage. Later studies have refuted this claim, and the FDA has extended the shelf life of tetracycline by two years.  Other drugs that are more sensitive to time include nitroglycerin, insulin, and liquid antibiotics.

When evaluating your own medicine cabinet, take note of the expiration dates you find. Within a few months of those dates, the products are most certainly safe and highly effective. After a few years have passed, the potency will decrease, so it might be time to get some new supplies. Another option is to take some simple measures to lengthen the shelf life of your medication and get the most out of your money.

• Keep your medications away from heat and moisture. This makes a cabinet in your bathroom or near your stove poor choices, since the heat and humidity your pills will encounter will cause them to degrade. If you do keep your medications in the bathroom, check them every six months or so for discoloration and crumbling, both of which are good indications that your pills are losing strength. Ultimately, the best place to store your medicine will be both cool and dry.
• Use the original containers. These bottles will protect the contents from excessive light, and they’ll also help to ensure that the right pills are getting to the right person. Using a separate container to organize daily/weekly doses isn’t a big problem, but for long-term storage, the original containers are best.
• The cool temperature in your refrigerator is a great resource, particularly for liquid medication. Keep your medicine from zones that are cold enough to form ice crystals, opting instead for the more mild spots that are typically located toward the front of your fridge. Of course, be careful to keep pills out of the reach of small children; they may mistake the medicine for candy.

If you have any questions about how to respond to the expiration dates of your medicine, get in touch with a qualified pharmacist. Thanks for reading!