Reactions | Can You Take Expired Drugs? | Season 5 | Episode 30

So the other morning I want to take my Adderall.

Yeah, you've all seen the typos on Twitter.

But the bottle said it had expired two months ago, so I wondered should I still take it?

So we're a YouTube channel, so we definitely can't recommend that anyone use medicine past its expiration date.

But what we can do is give you some information, like what expiration dates mean, how researchers figure them out, and how potentially dangerous (or maybe not) expired pills can be.

In theory, and let me reiterate that in theory part, expired medications could turn into something toxic, turn into something useless, or work exactly as expected.

Luckily, expired medications turning toxic doesn't seem to happen all that often or at all, really.

So again expired drugs usually aren't toxic, they just might not have enough of the original drug left in them to, well... do anything.

So the question scientists ask is, how long does it actually take the drug to become useless?

Chemical reactions are basically the reshuffling of chemical bonds.

Drug molecules are usually fairly big and complex, so there's a lot of bonds there that could react with things in their environment, changing them into different molecules that aren't in the drug you think you're taking.

But how fast and how much this happens really depends on a lot of things.

Things like heat and moisture and light are all things that can encourage those chemical reactions, and the exact chemistry of the drug molecule can make it degrade faster or slower.

So in theory again there could be a lot of reasons why drugs won't last a super long time.

Thankfully, in the United States the FDA requires drug companies to guarantee a drug will be effective for a certain length of time, and that's technically what the expiration date on say your ibuprofen bottle.

But chemists don't pull these expiration dates out of their beakers.

What actually happens is the drug companies have the drug sit around for a certain amount of time in both cool and dry conditions and warmer and more humid conditions.

They run tests to see if the pill or liquid or whatever has the same amount of the drug in it that was there when they started, and usually there is, with a few exceptions, of course.

Like aspirin.

Aspirin actually goes bad.

Drug expiration testing can get really labor-intensive if you do it for five or ten years or longer, meaning it's almost never practical to find the real expiration date for drugs.

Except sometimes we really want to know.

For example, did you know the government stockpiles drugs in case of epidemics or other huge medical disasters?

Neat, right?

And it would be real neat if they didn't have to throw away all those potentially life-saving medications just because of a somewhat arbitrary expiration date.

So the shelf life extension program tests drugs shelf life for the US government and has found a lot of drugs are good way past those initial dates.

A lot of doctors and other professionals would like to use this kind of data to get the FBI to extend expiration dates of the drugs we take outside of those government stockpiles.

So should I take my two-month expired Adderall?

I kept it in a cool dark place, it's a pill, and it's not a liquid, and two months past the expiration date isn't all that long.

Well, we can't tell you to take or not take that drug, but what we can tell you is that most pills will stay potent and reasonably safe longer than some poor chemist was paid to sit around and slowly watch them not expire.

Except aspirin.

Pull it together aspirin.

But hey,

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