Bingo. I’m suprised it took this long for someone to mention it, but one of the reasons for a wad of cotton in bottles of aspirin is to absorb moisture. You see, aspirin is acetylsalicylic acid. In the presense of water or moisture, the bond between the acetic and salicylic acids break down and it becomes acetic acide and salicylic acid, and not aspirin. If this happens, the bottle will smell like vinegar and you should throw it out.
Though more recently, more companies use a dessicant packet to absorb moisture, and have either left out the cotton altogether, or keep it for it’s other purpose, which as said is to help the pills stay whole during transit.
:rolleyes: You said something to the effect of ‘other kinds of pills don’t come with cotton’ except you never specified what kind of pill you believed did come packed with cotton. Like I said, look at your first post in the thread, read it, and see if it actually makes sense even to you. Just because you were thinking about aspirin doesn’t mean you wrote aspirin. We can’t read your mind, you know.
My job involves unpacking meds from bottles. There is cotton in perhaps 60% of them. These are, of course, industrial-sized, instituion-sale-only bottles, so of course YMMV.