Expired drugs found on pharmacy shelves

Expired medications should be taken off the shelf before they have a chance of reaching consumers, say pharmacists who stress manual checks of the expiry dates.

After Shoppers Drug Mart recalled one lot of Alesse 21 birth control pills that expired in September 2014 and were sold to about 100 women, a Richmond, B.C., resident sent CBC News photos of a newly purchased non-prescription allergy medication stamped with an expiry date of August 2014. A CBC producer found more on the shelf at the same store.

When CBC News checked a dozen drug stores from three chains in Toronto, journalists found a diabetic nutritional supplement that expired last October, other past due allergy medications, an expired sleep medication and a number of products that expire this month.

Expired medications, both prescription and non-prescription, should be taken off the shelf before they have a chance of reaching consumers, said Phil Emberley, director of pharmacy innovation at Canadian Pharmacists Association in Ottawa.

Pharmacists are fallible, but there are ways to prevent expiry date errors. (Paul Sancya/Associated Press)

"In a well-run pharmacy and drug store, there is a procedure for ensuring expired drug products are taken off the shelf before they expire," Emberley said.

"Consumers would not find expired product if they were to go, if they were to pick a product from the shelf. Further, in the dispensary part, there would be a fairly routine procedure, for example, once a month, to identify products that were soon to expire so that they would not be inadvertently dispensed by someone."

Regarding the Alesse recall, Emberley speculated that pharmacists made an assumption about newly arrived stock.  

"They may have assumed it was well within its expiry, when in fact it arrived at the store already expired. I think there may have been that false sense of comfort that this product was still dispensable, when in fact it wasn't."

Shoppers Drug Mart said it is reviewing its practices to prevent a recurrence.

In response to questions about the expired medications CBC News found on shelves, Shoppers said, "As a standard practice in our stores, our store teams regularly rotate in new product and check the expiry dates on the product on our shelves. Our policy is to remove expired product and note future expiry dates so that products can be culled before they expire.

"If any of our customers discover that they purchased expired product, we will refund it."

The other pharmacy chains did not respond to CBC News's requests for comment about their expired non-prescription products.

Guardian Pharmacy told CBC they were just made aware of the medication being available for sale on Thursday, and that they're taking the matter seriously.

"Guardian and I.D.A. are working with the store owner/operator to ensure that this particular product is removed and no longer available for sale," they said.

Julie Greenall, director of projects and education at the Institute for Safe Medication Practice Canada, said the Alesse recall illustrates how technology is not fail-safe and manual checks of expiry dates by pharmacists remain paramount.

"I think as we move to electronic systems that we do have an increasing reliance on those electronic systems and also we sort of take that for granted that that's already checked," Greenall said.

Currently, electronic inventory systems may include the drug name and strength in the bar code, but not the lot number and expiry date, an advance Greenall expects will come.

"There have been a number of studies done on expired medications that have found that they do tend to hold their potency over extended periods of time, but every medication is different. What we do know is that [most] expired medications are unlikely to be harmful," Greenall said.

Given that pharmacists are fallible, Greenall's institute recommends ways to prevent errors, including:

• An alphanumeric system for expiry dates that includes letters to make the numbers stand out.
• Expiry labels with the full four digits for the year.
• Printing EXP clearly to indicate the expiry date rather than the lot number.
• Have consumers check the expiry date themselves when possible.

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