What is the average shelf life of most subscription drugs? Can you usually use them for about one year after the printed expiration date?
Sure, you can take them after the expiration date. I wouldn’t do it. generally speaking (therefor, not always) the experation date means that the drug will no longer have its desired effect, or less of the desired effect. In some cases the expired drug can be actually harmful.
The relatively quiet ambulance station that I work at regularly turns over unused drugs that have exceeded their expiry date. Some of it is recycled into use as training aids, but there is still a reasonable quantity left over. We used to throw the unwanted excess into the garbage, until a charity approached SA Ambulance Service with a view to redistributing these drugs for use in third world countries.
This absolutely confirmed my suspicion that the expiry dates on almost all commonly used medications in Australia are very conservative, and that the true shelf life is considerably longer.
I’m sure this must also be true in other developed countries.
I think it also depends on how/where the pills were stored. IOW, an opened bottle in the warm, moist environment of your typical bathroom medicine cabinet would tend to degrade faster than an unopened container in a dark, dry, temperature controlled storage closet.
It also varies quite a bit, depending on the drug in question. Some medications will lose effectiveness while others will become stronger. I would suggest looking for information about your particular medication.
Do irradiated foods have a “shelf-half-life”? 
It’s definitely a conspiracy by the pharmaceutical companies. The truth be known, these drugs probably never expire, but the company just says they do! Oh well, keeps my jetsetting mother in work as she goes about the world with her clinical trials. DAMN I WANT HER JOB! 
There is no meaningful answer to your first question. It is like asking: What is the average size of an animal?
Some drugs last for hours, some for centuries.
The answer to your second question is: It depends.
A factual discussion about the use of drugs after their expiration date was published by The Medical Letter in June 19, 1998. You can find the text at the public reading room at themedicalletter.com (http://www.medletter.com/html_files/publicreading.htm#ExpDrugs).
It is very much worth reading (and only two pages long!)
some drugs have a definite shelf life! Tetracycline for one, which turns toxic, and nitroglycerine, which loses its effectiveness pretty quickly (a bad thing if you’re using it to treat angina!)
But a lot of expired drugs are (or used to be) shipped over to 3rd world countries for use where the regulatory agencies are a bit more lax (or non-existant). It’s hard for me to get too worked up about this, as these drugs are probably only 1 tenth of one percent less likely to be effective because of their age, and if they were not used by the 3rd worlders, they’d have no pharmaceutical at all.
Qadgop, MD
Qad, just TRY to donate some expired meds to an organization that provides health care in the third world and see what happens.
I would like to subscribe to some drugs. Would I recieve them monthly, or what?
I remember a news story (from only the past year or so) in which some government guy got the idea of testing the “expired” drugs that the armed services were routinely replacing at the cost of millions of taxpayer dollars every year. Turned out that vast, vast majority of them were still perfectly good. The military revised their expiration timetables accordingly, thereby saving us huge amounts of money (to, no doubt, be spent on $600 toilet seats).
Yeah, yeah, I know. You can’t donate them anymore, but selling them overseas used to be big business. Now the reverse is happening. People here are buying prescription narcotics on the net, from sites based in (or at least mailing out of) countries where the drugs aren’t regulated, and having them sent here. Quite illegal here of course.
I didn’t see this story but I know that in the 1980s, when I used to order drugs from a Department of Defense warehouse in Europe, the military had a policy of extending the expiration dates of drugs. They would sample a lot that was due to expire and, if the assays showed that the drugs were still good, they would assign a later expiration date. I don’t think they did this very often but I do remember them doing it.