If a drug is sold over the counter without a prescription, it’s considered to be pretty safe (or has a long tradition and a big lobby). Preppers can stock up on non-prescription drugs and decide for themselves when and how much to take.
Having said that, there are some things you should consider when thinking about what non-prescription drugs and supplies you want to stock. While I’ve looked at this once before here on 3BY, it’s time to explore the subject a bit more. Let’s take a look at some of the things you need to consider as a prepper when it comes to non-prescription drugs.
Additionally, there’s a link below for a just-published Salty & Spice podcast on the subject.
Drug Interactions
To make good decisions, you’ve got to know about potential interactions. (By the way, I’m not going to advise you on your decisions, because I’m not a physician.) Interactions occur when you’re taking multiple medications and they don’t work and play well together…or they work and play together all too well.
An example of ‘don’t work and play well together’ would be St. John’s Wort and, well, a whole host of things from birth control to heart meds. The wort interferes with a set of enzymes in the liver that’s supposed to remove the other drugs over time, so their doses get messed up.
An example of ‘work and play together too well’ would be taking acetaminophen and other over-the counter flu remedies such as Nyquil together. The Nyquil and its clones also contain acetaminophen, so you’ve just overdosed. This problem isn’t rare; acetaminophen overdose by accident this way kills people (or at least their livers) every year.
Pharmacists can be a big help
One resource a prepper has in getting the necessary understanding is the local pharmacists. These professionals are often overlooked since we mostly see them just filling prescriptions, but they are actually better trained in this aspect of medicine than physicians. Pharmacists know a lot about interactions and dosing, including the over the counter remedies and things that aren’t legally drugs (they’re definitely drugs in the physiological sense) – herbal supplements.
If you’re not into poking around on the net and reading medical-speak, or you are not sure which sources on the net to trust (a big deal in this area), your pharmacists can give you a summary on what to look out for regarding whatever you want to put in your stocks.
You might write the key things down and keep them with the drugs in the refrigerator or freezer. On a related note, the pharmacist may also be able to tell you whether refrigeration or freezing is best storage for a particular drug (it varies), and how serious to be about expiration dates (also varies by drug).
Here’s a podcast we did on the subject of interactions:
Pharmacists know a lot about interactions (including regarding herbal supplements) and some things about storage and shelf life too.
Generic or name brand?
There’s always lots of calls on one’s money. Is it worth it shelling out for a name brand drug if there’s a generic available? Generally not … but sometimes. Here’s how that sorts out:
Generic drugs are always a few years old at least; things that have run out of patent production. Since there’s competition to make and sell, they’re way cheaper than name brand. They also must have exactly the ingredients specified at exactly the concentrations indicated. Since the FDA would fall on any offender like a very expensive ton of bricks, compliance to these rules is quite good. In most cases then, a generic is exactly as good as the name brand.
The only thing a name brand can potentially offer that a generic can’t is formulation. Formulation includes details such as non-drug ingredients in the drug dose, and whether the drug might be in a chemical complex of some kind. These formulations are not important for the majority of drugs, but in some cases affect how well the dose lasts and how well it is absorbed in the first place. I read up on anything Salty or I take to see if the formulation seems to be a big deal, and if it doesn’t, we go generic every time.
Herbs and supplements
Either an herbal remedy is a drug, not completely removed from the plant that produced it, or it’s useless. They’re all chemicals, whether made by a lab worker or a plant. They all affect physiology. If they are effective drugs, in sufficient dosage they’re almost always poisons (too much of a good thing). To treat herbal supplements reasonably you’ve got to accept that being natural doesn’t make them automatically superior or safer. Cyanide is a perfectly natural poison for example (found in apple seeds, for one).
That said, herbs and supplements can be very useful parts of a prepper’s pharmacopeia. Their biggest strength is that once you learn how to do it, you can grow your own. Sometimes they have essentially the same drug as is found in commercial preparations (Mormon tea/Mahuang share an active ingredient with Sudafed), sometimes the active agents in the herb have not been replicated in the lab and sold commercially (hypericin and hyperporin from St John’s wort). In either case, the herb/supplement version is treated legally as a food, not a drug.
The good news
The good news is, being a food means anyone can buy as much as they care to (and it’s shelf life makes reasonable).
The bad news
The bad news is, the makers know the penalties for not matching contents to label are much less for foods, and they don’t have to prove their stuff actually works so long as they keep the medical claims on the vague side. Adulteration of products is rampant in herbal preparations, both for the pill-style supplements (1, and *many* other sources) and the bulk herbs (2). Worse yet, many supplements are adulterated not just with the wrong plants, but with lab-produced pharmaceuticals supplied without warning or safety overwatch (3). You don’t always know what you’re buying.
The other bad news is just due to the nature of the beast. Plants don’t always put the same concentration of a particular chemical in their leaves/stems/flowers. Growing conditions, that plant’s genetics, and stresses by insects play a big role. (Many drugs are produced to deter insect predators, and getting gnawed on makes the plant produce more deterrent.)
Some supplements are standardized to a particular amount of what’s suspected to be the most active ingredient; others are simply sold by weight or volume. Beware of symptoms of over- or under-dosing if you take the latter.
Because adulteration is so common, herbal supplements are one place Salty and I don’t go cheap/generic. There are some reasonably priced reputable sellers; we go with those rather than bottom dollar. Name brand companies have more to lose if studies show they aren’t selling what they claim to be selling (and there are lots of people doing such studies these days).
Major Mass Spec says: This stuff is *not* all true Arnica! Thanks Smmudge* for the image.
Before this post expires…
I’d like to remind us all (I too tend to slack on this) to keep drugs rotated so they don’t get too old. Most drugs lose effect with age; some faster than others. Refrigeration (or freezing for the drugs for which its appropriate) slows this but won’t stop it.
Some drugs may produce dangerous byproducts as they age. I’m not sure it’s true, but I’ve heard that opioids (the narcotic painkillers) in particular can do this, so all of our prescriptions for these get turned in to the sheriff for disposal when they get too old. The drugs we keep in the car bags get rotated more frequently than their expiration dates suggest, as all the temperature change in that environment is hard on chemicals.
We’ve
Here’s some information on prescription drugs I wrote about last year:
PrepperMed 101: Drug Basics for Preppers, By Prescription Only
1) Vaclavik, L., Krynitsky, A. J., & Rader, J. I. (2014). Mass spectrometric analysis of pharmaceutical adulterants in products labeled as botanical dietary supplements or herbal remedies: A review. Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry, 406(27), 6767-6790. doi:10.1007/s00216-014-8159-z
2) Walker, K. M., & Applequist, W. L. (2012). Adulteration of selected unprocessed botanicals in the U.S. retail herbal trade. Economic Botany, 66(4), 321-327. doi:10.1007/s12231-012-9211-6
3) Mateescu, C., Popescu, A. M., Radu, G. L., Onisei, T., & Raducanu, A. E. (2017). Spectroscopic and spectrometric methods used for the screening of certain herbal food supplements suspected of adulteration. Advanced Pharmaceutical Bulletin, 7(2), 251-259. doi:10.15171/apb.2017.030
*Smmudge at the English language Wikipedia [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons