At lunch today we got on the subject of survival bunkers. we agreed the two major things that all of us would want in the supplies is food and medication. The food problem has been solved by many companies selling MRE type survival food that last decades. But how about medications? It would stand to reason that to have a survival shelter that it would need to be pre-stocked and ready at a moments notice, sitting unused for years. How would out be able to stockpile medication in this serario. My thought is you would freeze it, but I am not sure if that would work. Will pain meds, antibiotics and such last indefinately if frozen?
Many medications can last well beyond their expiration date when kept at room temperature, preferably in a stable environment (the bathroom medicine cabinet actually isn’t a good idea because of the humidity).
Note that there are some drugs like tetracycline which may become toxic if kept too long.
As for freezing, I am not sure how that affects the viability of drugs but some do say not to freeze (and most recommend a range like 68-77F), although a dry pill with little or no moisture content shouldn’t be negatively affected by freezing. Given the 15+ year shelf life quoted above, just keeping them in a dry, cool, dark stable environment should be enough.
No mention of water? I’d kind of like some of that in my bunker, please, if I really wanted to survive.
And it’s hard to store water for years, and have it still palatable. (Mostly problems involving the containers it’s stored in; leaching from plastics, leaking from glass, etc.) So people who actually maintain survival bunkers tend to rotate their water, replacing the stored water every year or so, and using up the old ones.
Presumably, you could do the same kind of rotation with your medications – taking the aspirin, antibiotics, etc. from the bunker into your medicine cabinet, and replacing them with fresh ones every few years.
P.S. Freezing implies a working freezer, with a constant supply of electricity. When the time comes that you need a survival bunker, can you count on your electricity supply? Maybe if you have your own generator – then it becomes a question of how much fuel you have stored (and that deteriorates in storage, too.)
No one knows because no one has studied it. There is no stability protocol requiring that drug products be stored long term and verified for potency, degradation, dissolution/bioavailability etc at temperatures below freezing. Since there is no data there can be no answer to thus question.
It is plausible that drugs would remain stable and effective after long term freezing. It’s also plausible that coatings would harden, molecules would crystallize and no longer dissolve or be absorbed, moisture could degrade the product during thawing, drying of hydrolized molecules could alter their properties and whatever else that I’m too tired and speaking too generally to even think of. There are forced degradation studies of individual ingredients or combos of them that involve freezing but that is with the goal of establishing how chemicals degrade and what do they degrade into.
FWIW the answer to any “how do drugs behave outside of their existing label use and guidelines” question is "no one knows because there is no requirement that companies study it. No one does these studies, no one has this data, no one is likely to ever look into it.
As for that US military study: bear in mind that it also states that 10 of drugs were NOT stable significantly passed their expiration dates, nor does it say anything at all about the drugs and formulations that were not tested. While it does provide reason to believe that longer stability times could be acheived it should not be used to assume that they absolutely exist. And even if drugs were to be bumped up to 5 or 10 years stability, some person would still come onto the Internet and ask “is it safe after 11 years?” and the answer will be the same. No one knows, no one has looked.