A Space Oddity

Getting to the bottom of a very big bottle

To celebrate the festive holiday season, I thought I would write about my prostate gland; specifically, about the medicine I use to keep my prostate gland from expanding until it fills my entire body cavity, squeezing all the other organs out through existing orifices.

The pills are each the size of a peppercorn, factory-packed 30 to a bottle. The bottle, however, has the diameter of a toilet paper tube and is the height of a big man's fist, meaning there is a lot of rattle inside. The Pips could use this product to back up Gladys.

I asked my pharmacist about it. She said she had no idea why the bottle is so big and so empty, but noted that a lot of pharmaceutical companies package their drugs this way. She urged me to get to the bottom of this, glancing balefully behind her at a wall full of bottles containing mostly air.

So I called the New Jersey company that distributes the drug. A woman named Sharon, whose job is to answer questions, was stumped by mine. "I'm going to go to the war room," she declared, and then did, where she consulted more knowledgeable people, none of whom knew, either. So she gave me a phone number to reach the company's "medical affairs team," which turned out to be a recording urging me to call 911 or my local poison-control center if I believed myself to be dying.

Clearly, if I was going to get an answer I had to go outside the industry.

Howard Leary is an independent consultant who seems to be among the world's leading experts in the commercial packaging of pharmaceutical products, a designation he did not challenge but didn't act all high and mighty about, either.

Me: Do you understand what is going on here?

Howard: Yes. They don't really want to say this, but it saves a company on labor and inventory if they don't have to make bottle changes on the production line. So, they'll run smaller quantities of tablets in the same-sized bottles as they use for larger quantities.

Me: But isn't this ecologically irresponsible?

Howard: Yes. This is high-density polyethylene. They're using up a lot of petroleum.

Me: And shelf space. You'd think they'd at least put cotton in there or something, to make it SEEM more full.

Howard: Actually, that's not cotton in bottles. It's rayon.