Oh how pretty the oversized box is with it's splash of color and soothing graphics of clouds and flowers.  The over-the-counter medicines practically jump off the shelf in competition for a spot in your cart and on the center shelf of your medicine cabinet.  They impress you with their claims to be faster and stronger than the "leading brand", and win you over with "30% MORE FREE in This Special Value Size Bottle!".

But where IS the bottle?  When you are home with your cure and you can hardly wait to ingest the fast acting therapy for your urgent diarrhea or the migraine headache that is causing you to convulse on the bathroom floor, you finally reach the new box and proceed to open it....or TRY to.

After a lengthy fight through layers of shredding cardboard that are glued together with some sort of space-age adhesive that was probably designed for the tiles of the space shuttle, you manage to reach the "inside".  Hmmm.  What next?  You see several pieces of folded cardboard designed to hold the bottle in place somewhere inside the enormous box.  No traces of the bottle yet.  Did you open the wrong side?  I know you thought you might at least see the top or the bottom of the bottle by now, but have patience.  The cardboard spacers are held to the sides of the box with the same space shuttle glue.  Keep working, you can do it!  You are an adult.  This is a simple task.  But....oh the pain is getting worse.

Finally - you've sawed through the cardboard packaging with your nail file and have reached the prize held safely in the center of the box like anti-matter that would react at the slightest contact with matter.  This must be POWERFUL stuff to be protected so well.  And kudos to the engineer who designed that packaging marvel!

Well, there's the bottle.  Go ahead and open it.  WAIT!  This is the tricky part.  Make sure you step on the bottle cover and rotate with the heel of your shoe (you must wear strong skid-resistant shoes for this part - slippers will not work........I DON'T CARE IF IT'S THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT!  PUT YOUR SHOES ON!!

OK, now the bottle is open.  Pain relief is only a short time away.  What?  You thought you could just take the cover off of the bottle and reach in for a sweet little tablet?  Find that nail file again (preferably a sharp knife if you're in the kitchen).  PRY the protective foil from the rim of the bottle.  I know you can't pierce it with the nail file because of the layer of film that undercoats the foil, but if you are in the kitchen and that knife is sharp enough - go for it!  Don't bother looking for a little tab to grab onto the foil with your fingers - only two percent of drug manufacturers have developed the technology to provide this.  You'll be extremely fortunate if you can peel the foil off in less than seventeen shards.  The combination of the strength of the reinforced foil along with it's inability to stay together in one piece must be a product of the tamper-evidence philosophy.

Now you have finally made it to the inside of the bottle.  But, unfortunately, the wait doesn't end here.  There is one more hurdle to leap in your state of pain.  Look into the bottle and you will see an enormous wad of cotton.  Apparently the cotton is there to either assist in the anti-matter/anti-gravity thingy, or to keep your fine, lustrous tablets from being scratched and dented during transport.  Of course your fingers do not fit inside the bottle to reach the cotton, so this is where your prying/peeling/carving tools come into use again.  Ideally, it is recommended that a fishing hook be kept in your medicine cabinet for use in this stage of the extraction.  A tiny pair of needle-nosed pliers will also work, but are harder to find than the standard size, which is too large to fit through the neck of the bottle.  Careful now.....the wad of cotton is actually twenty-six inches long after it is decompressed, and many of the tiny tablets usually stick to the cotton (or are nested inside the strands) and can be lost to the dust bunnies on the floor or - worse yet - to the hungry toilet bowl if you are working on this project in the bathroom.  Now look inside the bottle.  Success!  Way down, deep at the bottom, you will find whatever tablets are left over from the opening process will be scattered along the bottom of the bottle.  Dump them out onto the counter, select one or two, and pour yourself a glass of water.

The alternative to the safety bottle, of course, is the consumer-proof (oops, I mean "tamper-resistant") blister package.  This brings me back to my bloody finger.  Although the blister sheets are easier to extract from the box than a bottle, just try getting your pills out of the blister sheet!  In the past, some manufacturers started using a break-away corner or tab to peel the sheet of protective foil away from the plastic tray.  It must have been too easy for terrorists to peel open the trays and poison the contents then seal the foil back up so that the consumer would not notice that it wasn't sealed from the factory.  I don't see many blister sheets with these easy-to-peel tabs anymore.

If you don't have long finger nails, don't even bother searching for the edge of foil that is not glued to the tray.  The edges of the tray are razor-sharp and the corners are pointed like the tip of a knife.  Perhaps this design is intentional for convenient use in piercing and prying open the foil cover of that bottle.  In any case, use the knife (or the edge of another blister sheet, if you've purchased the value size box) to cut around each blister then suck the pill out from sheet.  The "sucking out" process will ensure that the intended destination of the pill remains your mouth and not the floor, toilet bowl, or down the drain of the sink.

I just love progress.  And I'm so happy that manufacturers have employed these safety measures to protect me and my children from whatever it is they are protecting us from.  I need to go find a Band-Aid for my finger.  I just hope the box isn't sealed for my protection!