A box of prescription drugs sat forgotten in the back closet of a retail pharmacy long enough that some of the pills predated the 1969 moon landing. Sealed bottles, original containers, never opened. Diet pills under brand names nobody has spoken aloud in forty years. Barbiturates. A four-ingredient headache compound. Every one of them was at least twenty-eight years past the date stamped on the label, which meant that under every rule governing American pharmacy, they were garbage. Lee Cantrell, who helps run the California Poison Control System, looked at the box and saw an experiment nobody could afford to run on purpose. He called Roy Gerona at the University of California, San Francisco, a chemist who had grown up in the Philippines watching people take outdated medicine and get better anyway. Gerona ran the contents through liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. The results were published in the Archives of Internal Medicine on October 8, 2012, under a title that gives away nothing: “Stability of Active Ingredients in Long-Expired Prescription Medications.”

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