PrepperMed 101: Drug Basics for Preppers, By Prescription Only

Suppose medical care is suddenly no longer available.  But you’re a prepper, so you’ve got some useful drug supplies among your preps and could trade for others.  Suppose you’ve got an idea of what you need and how much to take. So you’re golden, right?

Well, you’re more like silver.  That’s way better off than lots of people, but there are still some things you might need to think about.  In this podcast, Salty and I talk over some of these issues, specifically the ones relating to prescription drugs.  Over the counter drug issues are addressed here in Part II.

By getting extra of their own prescriptions or whatever, sometimes a prepper’s stocks contain items that are usually available only be prescription. If that’s you, you might want to think about why that prescription requirement is there.  It can make a difference in how you handle the drug (or if you want to mess with it at all). So why are some drugs by prescription and some over the counter?

Some drugs are ‘prescription only’ because of their abuse potential

One reason drugs are kept prescription is that they are drugs of abuse.  A lab I used to work in had a choice between two drugs with similar effects on the system we cared about.  We always used Drug B, because Drug A had a second action of being a potent hallucinogen. As a result, Drug A is used recreationally in some quarters, so is a pain in the tail to buy for research — a Schedule 1 prescription drug with a major paper trail.  Drug B worked fine for our purposes but is no fun to take, so it’s much easier to buy.

The biggest prepper connection here, besides how easy it is to buy, concerns addiction and dependence.  If a drug is known to be addictive and it doesn’t have a great lobby (I’m looking at you, nicotine and alcohol), it’s likely to be limited to prescriptions.  In these cases, you would be One Sad Prepper if you started using it without being careful to avoid developing dependence and/or addiction.

Other drugs aren’t technically addictive, but one does adapt to them, so dosing requirements can change a lot over time and suddenly stopping them can cause serious problems.  Did you know you can get used to eating the poison arsenic by upping the dose a little at a time, then die because you quit getting your dose? It’s best to know about and plan for these problems, or you could end up in more hurt than if you’d never had the drug at all.  Here’s a post I did earlier with some ideas on handling this problem:

Cold Turkeys: Prepping For When Your Meds Run Out

Unintended Drug Consequences

A lot of people wonder, there in the dark of the night, “How does an aspirin know where it hurts?”  Well, it doesn’t. It’s just a stupid little molecule wandering around in the bloodstream. It’s a molecule that blocks or promotes one particular chemical reaction.  Wherever that reaction might be going on, the drug will have an effect.

The problem with that is some drugs interfere with reactions that might be involved with many different processes.  An example of this is omeprazole (Prilosec and others). Lots of people take this drug because it’s a proton pump inhibitor, which means it stops your stomach cells from pumping so much acid into your stomach and giving you heartburn.  It’s a pretty safe drug, too, when used as intended, so it got moved from ‘prescription only’ to ‘over the counter’ several years ago.

Once by prescription only, now over the counter, maybe soon prescription only again; this drug is an example of how good drug can cause bad reactions if used improperly.

Many people don’t use it as intended.  It was meant to be taken for 2-3 weeks at a time only, but when people started taking it chronically, problems became evident.  It turns out many of your other bodily processes use those same proton pumps. You’ll get by without them for a bit, but it starts to bite if you keep that reaction suppressed. In fact, there’s talk about moving this particular drug back to ‘prescription only’; the problems were a lot less common when doctors were limiting patients to the recommended cycles of dosing.

That sort of thing is where many side effects come from:  The drug does its business where you want it to, and where you don’t.  Why does this matter to preppers? In normal times, your docs (I’m not a physician, by the way, so all of this is information not recommendations) and pharmacists are looking out for you, keeping an eye out for side effects.  If you don’t have that help, you might want to be prepared to do it yourself. That means not only knowing what the drugs in your stock are supposed to do, but what else they might do; and in some cases how you can manage those side effects if they crop up.

Selection and dosing can be tricky

Many of the drugs that fall in this category of ‘prescription only’ are not a prepping problem, simply because it’s unlikely that most preppers will have access to them.  One category of drugs that does need prepper mention here is antibiotics.

Many preppers acquire antibiotics not meant for human consumption, ‘just in case’. If this is you, do you also have information on how to choose and dose them, by the way?  There’s no doubt that antibiotics properly used can be lifesavers. There’s also no doubt that using them badly can be literally worse than nothing. One of the biggest problems is one we’ve already done a podcast and story about: Resistance.  If you’re interested, you can find those here:

PrepperMed 101: Two Keys to Prepping Against Antibiotic Resistance

And here:

Antibiotic Resistance and You – The Podcast

In short, drugs are usually ‘by prescription only’ because of some special hazards associated with their use.  If you’re doing anything that might put you in the position of using these drugs without the oversight of physicians and pharmacists, you need to know what these hazards are and respond appropriately.

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