Here's part of the response my pharmacy executive friend sent me, last night. Note the article he refers to by Laurie Cohen appears to have originated in the WSJ, circa March 29, 2000. If someone wants the rather large full article you can get it for free by going to this site and put in an email address (any random one is fine, I noted):
www.mercola.com/2000/apr/2/drug_expiration.htm
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Craig,
Heat, age and extreme conditions can affect the medication. Once opened the efficacy does go down and the drug can degrade quicker. Of course the FDA states not to use the drug beyond the expiration date. I would use the drug up to 6 months beyond the expiration date if it has not discolored, has a foul odor or tends to be degrading by getting "powdery". My generic answer when I was behind the counter was...FDA and manufacturer recommends you don't use beyond the expiration date but I usually do unless it has the properties discussed above. I might have said a year but probably said I have used it after a year. Here is an interesting article:
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"Do drugs really stop working after the date stamped on the bottle? Fifteen years ago, the U.S. military decided to find out. Sitting on a $1 billion stockpile of drugs and facing the daunting process of destroying and replacing its supply every two to three years, the military began a testing program to see if it could extend the life of its inventory.
The testing, conducted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, ultimately covered more than 100 drugs, prescription and over-the-counter. The results, never before reported, show that about 90% of them were safe and effective far past their original expiration date, at least one for 15 years past it.
In light of these results, a former director of the testing program, Francis Flaherty, says he has concluded that expiration dates put on by manufacturers typically have no bearing on whether a drug is usable for longer. Mr. Flaherty notes that a drug maker is required to prove only 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.
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Now that the FDA has found that many drugs are still good long after they have supposedly expired, why doesn't it advocate later expiration dates for consumer drugs? One reason is that the consumer market lacks the military's logistical reasons to keep drugs around longer.
Frank Holcombe, associate director of the FDA's office of generic drugs, says that in many cases a manufacturer could extend expiration periods again and again, but to support those extensions, it would have to keep doing stability studies, and keep more in storage than it would like.
Mr. Davis adds: "It's not the job of the FDA to be concerned about a consumer's economic interest." It would be up to Congress to impose changes, he says. As things stand now, expiration dates get a lot of emphasis. For instance, there is a campaign, co-sponsored by some drug retailers, that urges people to discard pills when they reach the date on the label.
And that date often is even earlier than the one the maker set. That's because when pharmacists dispense a drug in any container other than what it came to them in, they routinely cut the expiration date to just one year after dispensing. Some states even require pharmacists to do this.
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Consider aspirin. Bayer AG puts two-year or three-year dates on aspirin and says that it should be discarded after that. Chris Allen, a vice president at the Bayer unit that makes aspirin, says the dating is "pretty conservative"; when Bayer has tested four-year-old aspirin, it remained 100% effective, he says."
Last edited by Craig6z; Jan 8, 2007 at 6:29 am