Failing to understand and test for the possibility that the two mirror-image forms of a molecule might produce different physiological effects and forcing an industry to needlessly spend billions of dollars to throw away and replace drugs that are still perfectly useful is not really the same thing.
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Yet the hash I bought in Sanlitun back in February is stale and nasty. Who knew?
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If only they made in stock pile bulk, that would drive down costs goes the theory on Supply
So, this is good news for people who found their grandmas Quaalude stash?
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No, please for the love of god don’t use 30yr old homeopathics!!!
Do you even know how strong they’ve gotten by then???
You’d likely overdose on placebo.
Well i’d be willing to try some vintage Laudanum. I do declare that nothing made today can cure my case of the vapors.
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So don’t throw out those foil-wrapped blotters that you’ve kept at the back of the freezer for the last decade.
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Remember this when it’s time to take some expired quaaludes.
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I took some expired ibuprofen and now I can see through walls.
Is it a superpower or a hallucination? Only time will tell!
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LSD lasts a long time. A friend told me.
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“A friend”, sure 
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I’ve worked in Med Device & Pharma for a long time. To get approval, the FDA (and basic logic) requires stability studies. Typically its reasonable to assume that devices and drugs aren’t going to sit around for more than 6-12 months. Unless there’s a specific reason, we aren’t going to do a 5 year real-time aging study if its not necessary. We would end up with a higher risk of failing during a time after it would reasonable have been consumed, and increasing time to market. Lose-lose for everyone. Not just an industry gimmick.
Accelerated aging can help, but it’s not always an accurate representation of a real time study, and often times it doesn’t decrease the study time significantly.
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We have an annual “drug take-back” day at the local police station. I don’t know what they do with them afterwards though.
I’m on one drug that’s in liquid form. You can tell if it’s expired because it oxidizes and turns brown after a couple of weeks (which it doesn’t do in pill form).
So I agree with some of the previous commenters – it’s very drug dependent.
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IIRC, we (FDA) were told that hospitals wanted to know if stored prosthetic heart valves were good beyond the expiration date, because they are so darned expensive. We asked them to do accelerated shelf life studies to extend it. I don’t think I’d want a new heart valve made of animal tissue that had been sitting around in solution beyond the shelf life. Of course, it’s not me who would actually be choosing which one off the shelf (which is a little disturbing, come to think of it).
Operating room nurse, getting supplies: "Whoa, this one’s been around far too long. Well, the hospital’s been telling us to cut costs . . . "
If you have expired or otherwise unused whisky or akvavit, please send to the approved disposal facility, over here.
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And remember that, once the research is done, most drugs are so cheap to make that the cost of creation might as well be zero. No real value is lost if the drugs are destroyed and exchanged for new ones. If manufacturers are refusing to exchange expired drugs, that’s a problem that should be dealt with, but the solution isn’t “remove expiration dates”.
The problem is that to replace the drugs, ie buy them again, is pretty much the original price until they are classed as generic. And even generics can be expensive.
The problem is not value lost, it is COST. To that vast majority of people called the general populace. And it appears we are paying WAY TOO MUCH. Which is fine for the pharma companies (who spend more than 50% of their budget on PR instead of anything else) but bad for the rest of the world.
The solutions is not to ‘remove expiration dates’ … it is to actually find out what the real expiration dates are! And it looks like many medicines could have been stored a lot longer.
And before anyone starts talking about the cost of developing medicines: if any person in a pharmacological company can afford more than one house and two cars it means we are paying too much for our medicine.
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Seems to me an aging study can be done real time for not that much more money than storage and testing. A facility, refridgeration, a few managers, admin and lab techs … require payment as part of FDA testing to finance.
This could save the general public a lot of money.
But it would mean the drug companies earn less, so it will never happen.
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LSD lasts a long time. A friend houseplant told me. 
At least i think that is what he said, it was hard to tell because the walls were breathing too loudly. Has it been minutes, or hours, or days? Oh did you mean stays good for a long time? well that too man…
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