A doctor's office suggested that the best thing to do with expired med's would be to mix them in with USED cat litter in a bag in the garbage. Since we are not supposed to flush this stuff down the toilet, mixed in the cat litter keeps people out of searching for discarded pills.

Vitamins I don't know so much about but I'll bet someone can tell you exactly how to handle them.

The best thing to do with expired meds is to find someplace that will accept these hazardous wastes to properly dispose of. No medications should be flushed down the toilet or sent to your sanitary landfill, even if mixed with cat litter. In many areas these days county health departments periodically set up places to accept expired, unused, extra medications for proper disposal and even some pharmacies are working on doing that on a regular basis.
The multi vitamins could go into your compost.

Why would you throw them away? What is going to happen to expired unopened vitamins and Tylenol The date are only on there to cause waste and buying of new drugs, life or death prescriptions maybe These just give them to someone that can use them

If properly stored [cool and dry] and unopened, most will keep longer.

Thanks, kimmsr. I'll compost the vitamins (they're for men, and my husband doesn't want them).

To wayne and jonas, do either of you know how long past the expiration date you can use them? Or are they good indefinately?

Thanks everyone.

Here in Portland, Metro schedules events for hazardous waste collection.

Here's their home page
http://www.metro-region.org/

Here is a link that might be useful: locate hazardous waste collection

This is coming from feelings, not hard core info, but I think many expiration dates are just hooey. Prescription meds have an expiration one year from filling. If accurate, the pharmacies would have to toss all remaining stock at that time also.

I've found aged bottles of both aspirin and vitamins. Wouldn't think of throwing them out.

I think that they probably just lose some of their potency.

I had once germinated a full bed of 5-year-old seed package that i thought was hopeless, but that has nothing to do with this thread i guess.

Although many people think the expirarion dates on medications are a lot of hooey there are good reasons for them being there. The expiration dates are more often then not a couple of years from manufacture and in that time things can happen such as that medication loosing potency. Some of these medications can also become poisons.
If someone wishes to trust their life to myth and rumor that is their privilege, but they should never advise anyone else to disregard common sense and use expired medications.

Kimmsr is partly correct. The dates are there for good reason. I own a lot of pharmaceutical stocks and the more you consume the better my dividends. I thank you for your support.

Oh, BTW, old aspirin in a bottle that has been opened for a long time has a lot more salicylic acid than does new aspirin or aspirin from unopened bottles so that is much more useful in propagation by cuttings than is the fresh aspirin.

I recently asked my internist about the potency/viability of expired medicines, both prescription and over-the-counter. She said they are effective for at least 5 years after the expiration date.

The question came up because I had a nasty cut and had been applying a 6-year old prescription cream for nasty cuts. She looked at the wound, said it was healing well, and to continue what I was doing. Only then did I ask her about the expiration dates of medicines.

Except for milk, I don't pay much attention to expiration dates.

Barbara in Virginia

I absolutely would use the Tylenol, and might even use the Vitamins, depending on how they look and smell upon opening.

Google came up with this from the Harvard Medical School -

Most of what is known about drug expiration dates comes from a study conducted by the Food and Drug Administration at the request of the military. With a large and expensive stockpile of drugs, the military faced tossing out and replacing its drugs every few years. What they found from the study is 90% of more than 100 drugs, both prescription and over-the-counter, were perfectly good to use even 15 years after the expiration date.

A few exceptions to this are nitroglycerin, insulin, and liquid antibiotics.

Here is a link that might be useful: Drug Expiration Dates

Thanks for all the suggestions.
I went ahead and composted the vitamins, and I guess what I'll do is ask around and see if anyone wants the Tylenol. If I can't find anyone I will check with Metro (thanks for the tip, jean001a--should've thought of that).

I've got a bad habit of over-stocking on vitamins and supplements. When I run across some of the older expireds, if I think they might be too old, I put them in the compost. My kids had a bottle of chewable vitamins that fell into the dirty dishwater. Since I was in the process of opening the bottle when it took it's plunge, some water seeped in. A few vitamins were damp, so I didn't want to give them to my kids anymore. On a whim, I kept them and poked them into houseplants and seedling pots like a fertilizer spike. I haven't seen any negative side effects from it. Not sure how much good it's doing, but it hasn't hurt.