What do you do with expired meds, does the pharmacy eat the loss?

It depends. In the US we have “prescription only” medication (things like antibiotics, diabetes meds, etc) as well as “controlled” medication (things like Norco, Xanax, morphine). With my former employer, we would go through the pharmacy and find non-controlled medication that was due to expire soon (3 or 6 months, I don’t remember) and send them back to our wholesaler for a partial credit. Packages had to be whole and unopened. With controlled medication, there is no sending back; the pharmacy holds the medication until it is actually expired, then sends it to be disposed of.

Do you mix and match pills with different expiration dates to fill a prescription? From different manufacturers?

Different expiration dates, yes, different manufacturers, generally no but if there’s no better option we would. In the US we generally fill from stock bottles containing several hundred or thousand pills, so one bottle can last a few months worth of prescriptions. When we go from one bottle to the next, the expiration dates between the two generally won’t be the same. When I left the company, we had a system that scanned the bottle we used and could read the expiration date; if the med expired in over a year, the label printed would just have an expiration date of 1 year from the current date. If it expired in less than 1 year, it would give a notification, and we’d manually enter the exact expiration date on the label.

I’m sorry, I can’t continue this conversation. It’s clear that you’re just kind of saying things that sound right. Your only argument is, “the pills themselves cost nothing to make” while ignoring everything that makes the pill cost money. Economics and cost analysis does not work that way. And in 7 years of working in a pharmacy, never once have we ever sent incomplete strips of meds to the manufacturer to get a complete pack. That is just not a thing that happens anywhere on a regular enough basis for it to be taken into consideration.

Yes, a sterile lab is expensive, but like normal business expensive. It’s very achievable to build, drug cartels manage it just fine.

This bit right here told me that I didn’t need to take this too seriously. An actual medical lab is not comparable to cocaine plants in the Congo.

But the pills themselves? The materials and production cost is cents. They themselves cost basically nothing

This is the exact same point from the previous comment. You cannot just look at the material cost of something and say, “see? It only costs cents to make.” Go buy a part that goes in a car engine - it’s just a few cents worth of metal! But, you can’t just take a hunk of metal and magically form it into car parts, there’s a manufacturing process and it’s expensive. That’s part of where the cost comes from. It doesn’t matter if you can make the most expensive pill in the world out of 10 cents of flour if you need a $10 million dollar assembly line to process it and turn it in to what is useful. They aren’t just taking a premade substance and pressing it into pills, there’s numerous chemical reactions and processes taking place.

That’s why other countries can afford to sell them for cents - they really are that cheap to make

You start your comment off with saying that R&D is subsidized, and end with saying “other places can sell them for cheap cuz they really are that cheap.” In these other countries, the drug company is not selling the medication directly to the public for pennies, it’s getting subsidized by the government to make it affordable for citizens. Granted the government is not paying US cash prices, but companies simply are not selling direct to consumers for 10x less than other places.

Look, this is coming from someone who fucking hates the predatory medical industry, especially that of the US. I used to work as a very small cog in it. There are absolutely places where prices are disgustingly manipulated and people are taken complete advantage of. Things exist today the way they are because of corporate greed and the continuance of putting profit over people. We can accept all of this as true, and still recognize that producing drugs at a medical grade, with medical levels of consistency and purity, is a difficult, expensive task that requires resources to accomplish. Medication needs to be cheaper (it’s my belief that it should be no direct cost to the user), but momentum is instantly removed from the cause when we use arguments based on a limited grasp of reality.

The expensive part is all markup

So we can waste the pills if we find a way to keep all the markup safe?

Also the idea that pills costs “cents to make” is pretty flawed. Even if you ignore all of the R&D money that goes in to making newer pills, the sterilized environment they need to be manufactured in is gonna jack the cost up too.

It’s like saying a cup of fresh, ice cold water that you’re getting handed to you in the middle of the desert is only “a few cents worth of water”. Yeah, but the fact that it exists in the middle of the desert for you to consume is what made it a “precious resource”.

That looks like he got the left-over-pile after a day of ever order getting from a new pack.

I’m saying that’s exactly what happened.

Never been to US though.

Things are done very, very differently here than most places. Blister packs are pretty uncommon, as are “per-patient” packages.

We rarely get bottles of 14, 30, 90 or whatever to give to the patient. It’s usually a giant “stock bottle” of like, 100, 500, 1000 pills that get counted out according to the prescription.

Your example of using the leftover from one script to the next works if you’re a single person in a small-ish pharmacy and it’s an uncommon drug, but when you’re one of 4 techs in a shitty retail pharmacy, you’re not going to ask every other person if they have a 2x2 strip of this med in their pile of go-backs, or spend time min-maxing the most efficient way to get the most pills in the least amount of strips. You’re gonna fill the thing as quickly as possible, because the medicine is what’s important, and you’re not gonna hold the backlog of prescriptions up because someone wants the nice complete pack of 10 and not the leftovers that are bound to pile up.

Uh, former pharmacy tech here… I don’t know what you want us to do. If I have a strip of, say, 10 pills, 2 rows of 5, and I get a prescription for 6 pills, that means I’m gonna have a strip of 4 pills left over. If I get a prescription for 9 pills, there’s gonna be a single one left over. Do you want these pills to just be thrown away? If they don’t have enough pills on hand to make your prescription with the full sheet, would you rather they delay your prescription so they can order some nicer looking ones?

I get that it can be frustrating dealing with those blister packs, but freaking out at the pharmacist/ tech that a. did not put the pills in a blister pack and b. doesn’t have any option but to dispense medication on hand, seems pretty misplaced. Like, I wouldn’t think something was wrong with the Walmart cashier for selling me a pair of scissors in security packaging.

I went on a canyon drive one time. We started with 7 cars, when we got to the end of our route, we had 8. Hopped right out of his car and stood around in the circle with the rest of us, didn’t even register for a second that it was just some random guy. He thought it looked fun so he kept up with us. Cool dude.

Full disclosure, am also on the spectrum so I may have got some things wrong here, but I think I can explain.

People think it’s funny when other people look like other things, and get frustrated when they themselves look like other things. I think this stems from the fact that once the comparison is made, it is hard to take the person seriously without thinking of the other thing.

Weird analogy that just came to mind: imagine you book a tour to some World War II museum. You get there, and your groups tour guide is dressed as spongebob, or Spider-Man or something. They’re an excellent tour guide, and know their shit, but you’d have to be thinking to yourself, “why is Spider-Man telling me about some of the worst crimes against humanity?”, and that thought would be kinda funny.

Now imagine your 20-something year old daughter is bantering with you and teasing you about your old man/ lady style. In the middle of the conversation, you see an ad for Encanto on the TV, and realize that your daughter looks exactly like the cartoonish and silly (not “stupid” silly that’s just how I describe the style) character in the movie. And you say, “why am I getting roasted by Mirabel?”, that’d be pretty funny.

“Roasting” and “sick burns” are one of those “insulting each other as friends” things NTs are more skilled at doing and understanding than we typically are. It can of course go too far or be taken the wrong way but I don’t think the person in the OP felt genuinely wronged or that the joke was mean spirited.

I hope I could help! Let me know if you’re still questioning it, and maybe I can try to clarify

pitcher

Why don’t you take a seat.

Maybe your cat is dumb, rips a chunk out, decides to eat it, cat could get sick or catch fire or something

Is that JayZ2Centz? Haven’t seen him in a while.

Is that Dance Dance Revolution 5? Haven’t seen that in a while.

Quick, someone send this post to the white house

Can we stop posting this shit? It was an obvious joke. Keep eating this garbage up and we’re in the same boat as the maga crowd.

That’s for grocery stores and the like. 95% of Chinese imports would be banned if plastic bags weren’t allowed in products (also, see: cereal)

People taking dumbass shit like this seriously is why the right will do literally whatever the fuck they want in this country. It takes 2 seconds of critical thinking and investigation to see that this is a complete nothing statement made as a joke. Yet half the people in the comments are gonna lock themselves in a bedroom and cry over this “attack on free speech”.

I really fucking hate it when people say “both sides are just as bad”, but c’mon guys. This is “the LIBS are trying to make your kids TRANS!” levels of stupid.

No. Read the article.

This sounded right, but then I remembered all of the televised court cases I’ve seen.

Yeah, really don’t like that one.

“The Internet” isn’t upset about you making a vagina joke, I’m dogging on you for thinking that 12 blurry pink pixels somehow resembles a vagina.