Over
the years, the packaging of over-the-counter and prescription medications has
gotten stricter. As a result, the efforts to open the pill bottles,
capped liquids, foiled pouches, etc. requires much more time, patience, and (in
some cases) instruments such as scissors.
Now,
while I completely understand the necessity of protection measures taken to
avoid children from accidentally ingesting such unsafe and sometimes deadly
drugs, I also feel it's time for some common sense to strongly be
introduced. For instance, medications that are designated to relieve
arthritis should not be in pill bottles that have locked caps requiring strong
hand/finger strength to open!
Additionally,
there are over-the-counter containers with a design that is really only ideal
upon initial usage – such as cough medications. Most of them are
packaged with a plastic cup mounted on top of the cap. Once you
successfully use your nails or scissors to access the bottle, there's a
"convenience" cup with transparent measuring lines to appropriately
match the instructed dosages (such as tablespoons). While that's a nice
and quick way to initially measure the cough syrup, it is not the brightest
invention for subsequent usages. Yes, you can rinse the cup, but based on
their measured dosages, those bottles are not supposed to deplete within one
sickly condition. Thus, if you plan to economically and environmentally
utilize the remaining liquid portions for the next sick incident, it would be inadvisable to reuse the supplied measuring cup for the next sick victim – even
if it's you, again! Of course, you can always sterilize the cup to avoid
gaining more germs than you already have, but after all of those efforts, you
might as well use a real tablespoon!
I
could dissect further illogical inventive designs for these containers, but you
get the idea. It's time for someone out there, who is not only inventive, but who offers a lot of common sense towards the users. I'm sure some day
someone will come up with much better and more logical child-safety
packaging…for adults' sakes!
