I just keep my meds in a paper bag (well sometimes plastic, the important thing is it's a bag, you put things in it and it sits there. If it does that, fine
) as I receive them from the pharmacy.
With the one exception of if i am picking up a chlormethiazole seizure rescue pack, and for some reason rather than put all the chlormethiazole capsules into one bottle, they put the rescue pack quantity into a separate one, and use a plastic bottle. Those MUST be taken out, and quickly, because the capsules, unlike the syrup version, use the freebase form of the drug, rather than the edisylate [ethanedisulfonic acid salt, AFAIK one has to get a bit specialist like that because chlormethiazole doesn't like to form solid, stable, well characterized and uniform salts. It's quite a bugger to salt it actually, if I make it myself using vitamin B1 as precursor [hehe, one man's OTC trash is another man's autie chemhacker precursor goldmine of treasure] I just don't bother, it IS a pain, so I simply form the freebase, extract into chloroform or dichloromethane, preferably dichlor, and vacuum-distill the base]. And it's a somewhat volatile liquid, and also, has the nasty habit of melting many types of plastic, indeed it's specifically specified as a drug one that pharmacies have to dispense in glass bottles. I left two capsules out on a computer keyboard once, and within hours, they had welded themselves to the keyboard and burnt a pair of capsule-shaped holes into the plastic. I had to use a razorblade or scalpel blade, forget which now, to surgically carve them out, shaving minutely thin layers off the thick walls of the capsules to avoid A-losing the contents and having to make some in replacement, using up precious thionyl chloride to do it [the waste, the pyrimidine fragment that is cleaved off as a byproduct during the initial step, bisulfite cleavage of thiamine/vitamin B1 also, must be dealt with very carefully and the intermediate alcohol from the cleavage purified with great care, as the pyrimidine portion is a deadly poison, known as 'toxopyrimidine', acting by throwning a metabolic spanner in the works of anything using vitamin B6 [pyridoxal] as a cofactor, processes which include biosynthesis of the vital primary inhibitory neurotransmitter, GABA, the same one that benzos, barbiturates and chlormethiazole, valerian root, among many others, potentiate the activity of at GABAa receptors, without it, one would die and die horribly and die screaming and begging to die faster], so it acts as a powerful convulsant poison and panicogen/terror-inducing agent. a truly hideous way to be poisoned, if one ever were to suffer such a fate. One of the nastiest ways to go possible for a human body. The sort of thing which could flay a man's soul alive, whilst his body convulses until he breaks his own back and suffocates, screaming and frothing blood at the mouth, every muscle in their body going into spasm, and the exact opposite of an anti-anxiety/anti-panic attack drug. Like a fatal degree of untreated benzo withdrawal magnified a billion-fold, until one finally dies in the most abysmal way possible, slowly and nastily. needless to say, the intermediate methylthiazole-2-ethanol must be cleaned with the utmost care, and the waste treated as if it were radioactive slop from ground zero after a nuclear strike. Actually, I'd sooner deal with the latter. But pure, it must certainly be, and without the least shadow of a hint of doubt before the second and final reaction, where it is chlorinated using thionyl chloride]
But if those capsules had spilled, I'd not only have lost the doses and had to make more, and use an expensive reagent which is devilishly hard and doubly devilishly dangerous to make, but difficult as hell to buy as well, given it can also be used in a modified Despretz or Meyer-Clarke synthesis of mustard gas [the sulfur mustard type, military codename 'HD' or 'pyro' for the distilled, purified blister agent] among other things, like nerve agents, but had it gotten into my keyboard it'd have ruined it.
So those get transferred into a glass bottle that the drug came in from an old script straight away.
I can ID most of my meds on sight, and if there's any doubt and the markings on the pill have worn off too, then by taste and sometimes smell. There are two that look similar, but the imprints are different, and I can tell them apart by that and the slightly larger size of the sleeping pill vs the muscle relaxant, as well as the sleeping pill tasting mint-like and sweet if a flake is chipped off and nibbled, whilst the myorelaxant tastes bitter and not minty.
I don't really need to sort through anything though otherwise, I can just identify them on sight, or by taste, smell or whatever else I need to, if I need to.
Only thing I'd not be able to tell apart would be a pre-prepared shot ready to be loaded into a syringe, if it were morphine alone, or morphine with oxycodone added. But it isn't a difference of consequence.
