Ok, dudes- you make your money by having me buy your products- then hopefully use them, and buy more, right?
Then-why-oh-why do you make the damn pills so fucking hard to get at?
Take a Benadryl (and I wish I could). It is on a card, with thin foil on th eback that you pop the pill out of. Fine, but now they cover that foil with paper, which you have to peel off to pop the pill out of the foil. But the goat-felching paper doesn’t peel worth crap. And if you push it through the foil AND the paper, the pill breaks.
Why add the fucking paper, you disease-raddled sons of syphletic camels?
So get a bottle, you say. Ok, but many pills don’t come in jars anymore. But if they do, I have to dop as follows: 1. Open a little cardboard box- not so hard. Toss the box. 2. Open the jar by following procedures that people who need to take the goddam jar can’t do- that’s why we need to take the fucking pill, godamnit! .3 Go through a thin foil- not so hard. 4. Remove a wad of cotton big enough to be a tampon for Rosie O’. Then, repeat 2, whenever you need the damn pills.
“Childproof”? If I have a child around, I will ask them to open the jar for me- they are better at it, and faster.
Now, there is a way to get around the bottle- pour the pills into another regular jar. But I can’t get around the felching paper.
I hate you OTC drug companies, and I consign you to a special layer of Hell, where there are painkillers- inside special “safe” containers- and all you have to do to get rid of the terrible pain of the torture, is get at the pills. Heheheheh :mad:
OTC? Try taking a look at some of the prescription meds for migraines. You’d think they’d design something easy to open for something like that, wouldn’t you? No fucking way. Imitrex has one of the worst packaging - it comes in a “card” of nine pills. First you have to separate 1 of the nine, then you have to peel the foil off of a little corner and pull it back. And the packaging actually used to be a lot worse.
Amen, DrDeth. I have to blast one of those bastards out of its inexorable igneous matrix, wrap what’s left of it in cream cheese and give it to my dog. Twice a day. Every day.
When I’m confronted with the PITA wrappers mentioned by the OP, I find an x-acto knife cuts through all that bullshit quite nicely.
The OTC people need to take a cue from those innovative prescription bottles with double sided lids. Screw it in one way and it’s “childproof.” Screw it in upside-down and it’s a regular cap; two little twists will open it right up.
Often, the foil packaging is used to meet long-term stability requirements, such as tablet moisture content. When the drug is being investigated, this sort of thing is tested extensively (several year projects) for different packaging materials and configurations. It was decided that the blister pack with paper was better for that particluar product. Who knows, maybe the benefits chemical-wise are small, but overall cost of packaging is must better, making the pill more affordable. Basically, there is a reason it is packaged that way, and it’s often because other packages just don’t work.
I know they are a PITA, but there are guidelines in place for what sort of packaging needs to be used for the type of medicine in question. Pit the FDA for those, not necessarily the company, I suppose, thuogh you must consider that there’s likely a precedent for these sorts of things.
I think you might have hit upon the last universal truth.
The only people who ever buy tablets without packaging are druggies.
It isn’t that they are addicted to the pharmacological effects produced in the body; the addiction is to the thrill of not having to negotiate the packaging material - that’s why they do it.
One of our dogs gets Benadryl. We buy it at Sam’s, where it comes in huge bottles and is cheaper (yes, corporate evil and all, I know, I know…) and as often as not dump the pills in an old prescription bottle from the other dog’s antidepressants. It’s no problem at all.
Those “childproof” caps on Tylenol or ibuprofen are just plain evil, though.
