How Long Will Antique Drugs Still Work?

November 22, 2009 2:15 PM

Ancient drugs...opium, morphine, even absinthe. Can they still be potent after decades?

If you were to find your great-grandma's cocaine cough syrup, or her opium-based migraine reliever, would they still have any power left in them?

Could someone pour hot water in a 90 year old opium bottle with sludge at the bottom, swirl it around, and ease their pain with the remnant of the residue?

Similarly, what about ancient alcohols? I know wine is supposed to keep for a hundred years, but what about something as toxic as absinthe? Does it continue to ferment? Does it turn to poison? To vinegar? Does it became harmless?

For the record, I'm not trying to get wasted on old sticky medicine bottles....just research for a story. Plus now I'm really curious.

My google fu has failed again...just keep getting ask-yahoo pages about two-year-old vicodin.

Any experience or observations?

posted by esereth to health & fitness (15 comments total)

On those kinds of time scales it would probably depend a lot on storage conditions: the seal on the bottle, heat, humidity, and exposure to sunlight would be the biggest factors.
posted by jedicus at 2:23 PM on November 22, 2009

I always use the drugs long before I have to worry about this kind of thing, but here's some Google advice: putting minus-signs in front of things excludes them. So, for example, adding '-site:answers.yahoo.com' to your search terms will exclude all results from that site. Similarly, adding '-vicodin' will exclude all results which mention that particular drug.
posted by box at 2:27 PM on November 22, 2009 [2 favorites]

Absinthe isn't toxic.
posted by oneirodynia at 2:34 PM on November 22, 2009 [5 favorites]

Organic molecules (such as most drugs) will degrade over time. By degrade, I mean undergo chemical reactions that reduce or eliminate their therapeutic activity. How fast they degrade depends on the chemical in question, the environmental conditions, and the formulation. A solid will keep longer than a liquid, and a chemical kept in the cold will keep longer than one exposed to high temperatures.

As far as alcohol goes, fermentation is a self-limiting process. The yeast essentially die from the alcohol they produce. Beyond this threshold concentration, distillation is needed to produce a higher alcohol content. However, I imagine that wine and liquor can be affected by non-biogenic reactions that will make it unpalatable, given enough time.
posted by dephlogisticated at 2:42 PM on November 22, 2009

Similarly, what about ancient alcohols? I know wine is supposed to keep for a hundred years, but what about something as toxic as absinthe? Does it continue to ferment? Does it turn to poison? To vinegar? Does it became harmless?

Well it won't continue to ferment, that's for sure. Yeast will die at those alcohol levels (~50-75% for absinthe). It won't turn to vinegar, either, as the bacteria that produce vinegar would also find that an unwelcome environment.

I'm not sure what you mean by harmless. The ethanol will still be around, more or less. It's not going to turn to something inert.

The thujone and other wormwood extracts seem to stick around as they've been found in old absinthe.
posted by jedicus at 2:49 PM on November 22, 2009

Sometimes google scholar can be more useful for screening out the less useful results, although I was getting a lot of stuff about stability of drug compounds in blood and urine samples which still isn't helpful. There does seem to be some research done on morphine stability which may give you somewhere to start (morphine is one of the things found in opium). Oh, maybe shelf life is a better term.

Modern absinthe has been shown to have one active ingredient: alcohol, but the original stuff may have had biologically active amounts of plant extract (containing the terpene thujone). It's a spirit with a fairly high concentation of alcohol and terpenes are stable in alcohol so might stay OK. This article (pdf) supports that idea and a google scholar search for absinthe shows quite a bit of research to look through.
posted by shelleycat at 2:55 PM on November 22, 2009

I just read the following in "Confessions of an Opium-Seeker":

“Have 15-year-old. Have 13-year-old, have 12-year-old. What you want?”

Aged opium?

Yes, aged opium. There are reputed yet to be, in the dark, cool cloisters of the wealthiest connoisseurs, fine porcelain urns of opium, subtly and elegantly fermenting, now for 80 years and more, from the exclusive special stocks of the grandest of the old Shanghai salons.
posted by glibhamdreck at 2:56 PM on November 22, 2009 [4 favorites]

MDMA: "I believe it was Shulgin or McKenna who said that if MDMA were buried with the pharaohs in the pyramids, it would still be active today.". Damn- makes me wish I'd buried a couple of bags back in the early nineties, when the good stuff was just everywhere.
posted by Siberian Mist at 3:52 PM on November 22, 2009

The bottles themselves can sometimes make the contents more dangerous, if the glass used in the bottle has a high lead content, which a great number of old bottles do. Porcelain would be a perfect container, but glass... I wouldn't trust so much.

The best, but most difficult, way to find out would be to get someone who could discreetly use a spectrometer in the lab's off-hours.
posted by chambers at 8:16 PM on November 22, 2009

Ask the good folks at erowid. Here's a similar question. Also.
posted by gingerbeer at 9:06 PM on November 22, 2009

I just read the following in "Confessions of an Opium-Seeker"

A nice bit of writing, but surely he must be joking:

It was almost impossible to get opium these days anywhere in America or Europe. For two years, with the help of many, even those not unfamiliar with the less savory strata of society, I searched. New York, nothing. Paris, nothing. London, nothing. Rome, nothing. Berlin, nothing. [...] Hong Kong, nothing. [...] Thailand, nothing.

The man has enough money to travel (and travel well) throughout the Eastern and Western World but never thought to hop on the cheapest direct flight to Laos and simply climb a mountain? Would have saved him about 3,000 words.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 11:09 PM on November 22, 2009

Speaking specifically to the absinthe:

The color of absinthe will change to a yellowish brown, as the chlorophyll degrades, but a well-sealed absinthe should remain quite drinkable and even very good. I have actually been fortunate enough to sample some absinthe from 1914, and it was sublime.
posted by kaseijin at 12:16 PM on November 24, 2009

Also, absinthe is not fermented and so it will not continue to ferment. It is a distilled liquor, bottled at around 68-72% ABV. It holds up quite well to time and ages not unlike a Scotch would, with the tannins from the chlorophyll content performing a similar function to the tannins from wood-aging in a whiskey.
posted by kaseijin at 12:19 PM on November 24, 2009

The name of the yellow-brown color of aged absinthe is feuille-morte, by the way, if that helps your story.
posted by kaseijin at 12:26 PM on November 24, 2009

Incidentally (damn, I keep rambling... mods, feel free to condense this blather into one post if you need to!), this:

"Modern absinthe has been shown to have one active ingredient: 
alcohol, but the original stuff may have had biologically active 
amounts of plant extract"

is false. Or at least not wholly accurate and potentially misleading. Modern absinthe, when properly produced, is virtually no different than the absinthe of the 19th century. The largest difference is likely to be the base spirit used (grain neutral in most modern absinthe, versus esprit du vin grape spirit for many vintage labels). This is muddles up a bit by virtue of there being a good many modern spirits pretending to be absinthe that are, in fact, merely artificially colored and essence-flavored vodkas...so the confusion here is understandable.

The botanicals used in traditionally produced absinthes have never changed, and this is a course of fact; it's worth noting here that the production of absinthe was never really lost as many allege: it just went underground for a while.

Vintage absinthes were no more psychoactive than their modern counterparts.
posted by kaseijin at 12:40 PM on November 24, 2009