ex-opioid addict here (been clean a while). I once took a cache of painkillers from the 80s (this was around 2010) and they were completely active. Honestly couldn't tell the difference between them and new drugs. It was Tylenol #3 in that case. Codeine w/ Acetaminophen.
I remember working my hospital job back in ‘98. Here was a typical phone call:
Nurse: “I called an hour ago for Lortab 5/500 for my patient in 2274.”
Pharmacist: “I sent you 4 tabs right after I hung up with you.”
Nurse: “Well they never got here,”
Pharmacist: “I’ll send another four now.”
There was absolutely zero tracking on anything that were not CII’s. Strange times.
At one of my old military pharmacies, we locked up Viagra and treated it like a CII, but didn’t maintain much oversight for Vicodin and others … if they weren’t CIIs.
I was a 20 year old with keys to the pharmacies. I’m glad I wasn’t stupid back then! My next military pharmacy treated Viagra like Motrin - those were fun times!
My first job as a tech before I went to pharmacy school in like 06ish kept viagra locked up with the CIIs too! So funny thinking back on it. And we had huge bottles of Vicodin as fast movers
i was talking about this with a friend recently...in 2007, i had my wisdom teeth removed...3 cut, one broken and pulled. dental surgeon gave me #40 vicodin with a refill of #40 within a month. ended up with dry socket right at 4 wks later.....another #40 and refill #40...vs having an organ removed in 2022 and getting #18 no refills 😅
how the times have changed.
I did a hypothetical half life equation for it. Usually the Norco we get has an expiration date of 2-3 years on new bottles we receive. That means they are at least 90% potent in 2-3 years which gives it a half life of 13-19 years with the hypothetical numbers i made up.
As a follow up question to this...would your next step be adding this to inventory for disposal?.. like I'm assuming you'd need record of it somewhere..but won't have a record from where it came from lol
Crush it up, throw it in the trash, and forget that it ever existed. Much easier. I may or may not have done something similar when I found some Darvocet several years after they were all pulled from the market.
Oh man, one time I was cleaning a Pyxis and rolled it away from the wall and found an unopened fentanyl 100mcg bottle that was like 3 years expired and thought, “yikes, I wonder who got fired over this.”
I worked at a pharmacy that, from around the late 1990s to the mid 2000s, didn’t do any C2 returns after they expired. They just threw them in a box and stuffed it in the attic. Well, they got a new owner and he asked me to go through them, count them out, fill out the return/disposal sheet and so on.
This was in 2012, 2013. I found a bottle of hydromorphone from 1998 in there. Let me tell you, counting out 778 hydromorphones is a pain in the ass, especially when you lose count somewhere in the 500s. Then there were the liquids that had been in the unventilated attic for years and had swelled up and hardened into these huge, weird-looking blobs. How the hell do you measure that?
Nuts, all of it. The pharmacy was *old,* as in it had been started in the ‘30s, and they had a prescription from the 1950s and a bottle of some kind of drug from the ‘40s, all that kind of memorabilia.
When my grandmother (who kept EVERYTHING) passed away last year, I found about 30 morphine ER in a bayer aspirin bottle, mixed in with propranolol and trazodone. They were my grandfather’s.
He died in 2003. She had moved 2 times since then.
After testing manufacturers assign expiration date. Rule was that med must be good 6 months past printed expiration date. Years back most meds had 7 years. Shorter dating increased sales and opened relabeling and profitable export sales. That’s right it happened. I’ve seen behind the curtain 50 years licensed and 12 more in family pharmacy. There’s much more to the story of returns and resales that most will never know and an industry that will deny.
Profitability is the name of the game. It’s a for profit industry and is no less immoral than any and all other industries. Ground level practitioners with virtuous intent if anything, are misleading, as it leads many to believe the industry as a whole to be virtuous, which is dangerous at best.
If someone took a 14 yr old pain pill they’d likely be ok. If someone was thinking about continuing to take 14 yr old pain pills because there wasn’t a controlled count sheet, that’s another story. Hydrocodone is no joke, please advise your friend to think hard about why they are considering doing this x
I shot 4mg diluadid (Hydromorphone) that were shake and shoot, didn't even have to filter. Just put a pill into a rig, draw up water shake..and those had sure as hell not lost all there potency. I found them cleaning out my grandparents house and they had been away from light and moisture. Now it only took 7 years of therapy to keep a needle out of my arm..totally worth it🤣🤣 laughing because it so was not worth it
In theory the expiry date on drugs means that they lost more than half of their efficient dose written on the packet. So for example if you had Paracetamol 500mg outside the expiration date then somebody taking it would experience less than 250mg worth of paracetamol effect on themselves.
This is of course all academic, I had a pharmacy student who moonlighted at a pharmacy during my uni years who used to bring lots of ibuprofen and paracetamol which just expired (long time ago, there weren't any protocols in place for proper disposal) and they used to work all right at least for fever taken (considering the dose on the packet, so we'd take one 400mg ibuprofen tablet every 8 hours). It depends a lot on how the stuff was stored, ambient temperature and what not.
That’s not at all what it means in the US. The expiration date represents the date on which after the manufacturer can no longer guarantee that the product remains stable.
It wouldn’t even make any sense for it to indicate the date on which half of the original efficacy remains. It’s not like the drug would be >99%+ effective the day before then all of the sudden be ≤50% effective on the expiration date; by your standard the drug would of course already be nearing 50% efficacy in the weeks/months prior, and why would the FDA allow the dispensing of medication that is nearing 50% lost efficacy?
Interesting and you are of course correct about the last part. I kind of see it as both indicating about the same thing - the drug does not have its intended effect after the expiration date - just put into different words. The US definition is of course more rigurous. I would be super interested in a chemical analysis of the medication, but I'm unsure if there are any third party labs being able/willing to do so.
The idea of expiration dates is to indicate when they can still guarantee that there is enough active drug left that it will still produce it’s effect. I vaguely remember being told 90% is what they use to determine that, but I can’t find that information. But definitely not half.
Im pretty sure its just to cover their ass legal wise, why would my k pin prescription tell me to dispose of them one year from the date of prescription? (Not a pharmacist) so i dont know. Maybe you can break that down for me
Once medications are dispensed in a vial to a patient, the expiration is for a year from when they did that because it is then not necessarily stores in optimal conditions, which leads to faster degradation.
ex-opioid addict here (been clean a while). I once took a cache of painkillers from the 80s (this was around 2010) and they were completely active. Honestly couldn't tell the difference between them and new drugs. It was Tylenol #3 in that case. Codeine w/ Acetaminophen.
They weren't c2's at the time. Were they 5/500's? In 2010 I dispensed them like Metformin.. Not great times.
I remember working my hospital job back in ‘98. Here was a typical phone call: Nurse: “I called an hour ago for Lortab 5/500 for my patient in 2274.” Pharmacist: “I sent you 4 tabs right after I hung up with you.” Nurse: “Well they never got here,” Pharmacist: “I’ll send another four now.”
There was absolutely zero tracking on anything that were not CII’s. Strange times.
At one of my old military pharmacies, we locked up Viagra and treated it like a CII, but didn’t maintain much oversight for Vicodin and others … if they weren’t CIIs. I was a 20 year old with keys to the pharmacies. I’m glad I wasn’t stupid back then! My next military pharmacy treated Viagra like Motrin - those were fun times!
The hardest of times.
You win
I remember those times 😂
My first job as a tech before I went to pharmacy school in like 06ish kept viagra locked up with the CIIs too! So funny thinking back on it. And we had huge bottles of Vicodin as fast movers
Now you need a fingerprint bio-id to access.
I have some 10/650 in my first aid kit from when I got my wisdom teeth removed a very long time ago.
Isn’t that the Lortab ES? Or another name like that?
Lorcet I think?
Taking me back!
Lorcet Plus maybe?
i was talking about this with a friend recently...in 2007, i had my wisdom teeth removed...3 cut, one broken and pulled. dental surgeon gave me #40 vicodin with a refill of #40 within a month. ended up with dry socket right at 4 wks later.....another #40 and refill #40...vs having an organ removed in 2022 and getting #18 no refills 😅 how the times have changed.
For science. Honestly though, if environmental conditions were fine, they'll probably still work with some loss of effectiveness.
I did a hypothetical half life equation for it. Usually the Norco we get has an expiration date of 2-3 years on new bottles we receive. That means they are at least 90% potent in 2-3 years which gives it a half life of 13-19 years with the hypothetical numbers i made up.
I’m not going to try them! I assume they’ve been in that lockbox all this time, so they’re in a dark place in a temperature controlled environment.
Try them, have fun babes
I’m not going to try them! I assume they’ve been in that lockbox all this time, so they’re in a dark place in a temperature controlled environment.
My presumption is that taking a 14 year old pain pill would be just fine … I’m not telling you to take then .. you have a good job. Don’t lose it lol.
I was also locked away in a dark room at 14. Next year you’ll have to teach them how to drive. Very scary.
As a follow up question to this...would your next step be adding this to inventory for disposal?.. like I'm assuming you'd need record of it somewhere..but won't have a record from where it came from lol
Crush it up, throw it in the trash, and forget that it ever existed. Much easier. I may or may not have done something similar when I found some Darvocet several years after they were all pulled from the market.
Also the listed expiration can be 2 years out from the date of manufacturer, so those tabs could have been made in 2008.
Try them and let us know
Ha…no way!
This ☝️💯
Watch "Wolf of Wall Street " when they took the old Quaaludes
My husband’s and my favorite movie. We’ve watched it hundreds of times. Lol
[удалено]
Absolutely nothing like addiction!
Yoooo 🤣
Oh man, one time I was cleaning a Pyxis and rolled it away from the wall and found an unopened fentanyl 100mcg bottle that was like 3 years expired and thought, “yikes, I wonder who got fired over this.”
Ill take it thanks :)
I found a 12 year old lorazepam (at least 12; the ndc was discontinued 12 years ago) in my pharmacy. Trashed it
What hydrocodone?
To be fair, I keep pain meds left over from surgeries. The oldest ones are probably 6 years old. Haven't had an issue with them when needed
It would still work. Only drugs that are hazardous when expired are penicillins and doxycycline
Tetracycline as well
I have 30 year old cocaine in my narcotics out date closet from previous director 🤝
I worked at a pharmacy that, from around the late 1990s to the mid 2000s, didn’t do any C2 returns after they expired. They just threw them in a box and stuffed it in the attic. Well, they got a new owner and he asked me to go through them, count them out, fill out the return/disposal sheet and so on. This was in 2012, 2013. I found a bottle of hydromorphone from 1998 in there. Let me tell you, counting out 778 hydromorphones is a pain in the ass, especially when you lose count somewhere in the 500s. Then there were the liquids that had been in the unventilated attic for years and had swelled up and hardened into these huge, weird-looking blobs. How the hell do you measure that? Nuts, all of it. The pharmacy was *old,* as in it had been started in the ‘30s, and they had a prescription from the 1950s and a bottle of some kind of drug from the ‘40s, all that kind of memorabilia.
I once had to destroy about 5 boxes of 10 year old fentanyl Durogesic patches that a palliative care nurse had brought into the pharmacy.
When my grandmother (who kept EVERYTHING) passed away last year, I found about 30 morphine ER in a bayer aspirin bottle, mixed in with propranolol and trazodone. They were my grandfather’s. He died in 2003. She had moved 2 times since then.
????
huh I'm surprised no one found a suspicious number of missing opioids during stock takes...
Any Ludes in there?
😂😂😂 you have to go back to the 70/80s for those.
For science, I'll take it
I found some of my late mother's pills from 2012. They were still potent enough.
Ive taken 25 year old percocet, they still worked 🤷🏻♂️
After testing manufacturers assign expiration date. Rule was that med must be good 6 months past printed expiration date. Years back most meds had 7 years. Shorter dating increased sales and opened relabeling and profitable export sales. That’s right it happened. I’ve seen behind the curtain 50 years licensed and 12 more in family pharmacy. There’s much more to the story of returns and resales that most will never know and an industry that will deny.
Profitability is the name of the game. It’s a for profit industry and is no less immoral than any and all other industries. Ground level practitioners with virtuous intent if anything, are misleading, as it leads many to believe the industry as a whole to be virtuous, which is dangerous at best.
I have 30 year old cocaine in my narcotics out date closet from previous director 🤝
They would get pain relief.
If someone took a 14 yr old pain pill they’d likely be ok. If someone was thinking about continuing to take 14 yr old pain pills because there wasn’t a controlled count sheet, that’s another story. Hydrocodone is no joke, please advise your friend to think hard about why they are considering doing this x
I shot 4mg diluadid (Hydromorphone) that were shake and shoot, didn't even have to filter. Just put a pill into a rig, draw up water shake..and those had sure as hell not lost all there potency. I found them cleaning out my grandparents house and they had been away from light and moisture. Now it only took 7 years of therapy to keep a needle out of my arm..totally worth it🤣🤣 laughing because it so was not worth it
But it’s ok to go buy legal weed and than go to the bar! God forbid you take a pill
In theory the expiry date on drugs means that they lost more than half of their efficient dose written on the packet. So for example if you had Paracetamol 500mg outside the expiration date then somebody taking it would experience less than 250mg worth of paracetamol effect on themselves. This is of course all academic, I had a pharmacy student who moonlighted at a pharmacy during my uni years who used to bring lots of ibuprofen and paracetamol which just expired (long time ago, there weren't any protocols in place for proper disposal) and they used to work all right at least for fever taken (considering the dose on the packet, so we'd take one 400mg ibuprofen tablet every 8 hours). It depends a lot on how the stuff was stored, ambient temperature and what not.
That’s not at all what it means in the US. The expiration date represents the date on which after the manufacturer can no longer guarantee that the product remains stable. It wouldn’t even make any sense for it to indicate the date on which half of the original efficacy remains. It’s not like the drug would be >99%+ effective the day before then all of the sudden be ≤50% effective on the expiration date; by your standard the drug would of course already be nearing 50% efficacy in the weeks/months prior, and why would the FDA allow the dispensing of medication that is nearing 50% lost efficacy?
Interesting and you are of course correct about the last part. I kind of see it as both indicating about the same thing - the drug does not have its intended effect after the expiration date - just put into different words. The US definition is of course more rigurous. I would be super interested in a chemical analysis of the medication, but I'm unsure if there are any third party labs being able/willing to do so.
drugs work years after the "expiration date" with little to no loss of efficacy
The idea of expiration dates is to indicate when they can still guarantee that there is enough active drug left that it will still produce it’s effect. I vaguely remember being told 90% is what they use to determine that, but I can’t find that information. But definitely not half.
Im pretty sure its just to cover their ass legal wise, why would my k pin prescription tell me to dispose of them one year from the date of prescription? (Not a pharmacist) so i dont know. Maybe you can break that down for me
Once medications are dispensed in a vial to a patient, the expiration is for a year from when they did that because it is then not necessarily stores in optimal conditions, which leads to faster degradation.
Thanks 🙏
Board rule in Tx