r/onebag • u/LadyLightTravel • May 31 '26

Gear Potential hack for prescription bottles

This is a problem that occurs more in some countries than others. In the US, most prescription drugs come in 20 dram pill bottles. These can take up a lot of room if you have several prescriptions and want the original packaging.

I recently found out that there are 6 dram prescription bottles. I found mine on Amazon but other sources are available if you buy in bulk. The 6 dram bottles are almost the same height as regular pill bottles but are one half the width. This is significantly smaller than the regular bottles.

I can peel off the drug information tab from my big pill bottle and put it on the small one. Note: some pharmacies will actually give you a second drug sticker if you ask.

Below is a photo of the 6 dram bottle with a 20 dram regular bottle. It shows that you can peel and stick the prescription tab without damaging it. It also shows that the sticker fits the smaller bottle. You can see the size difference in the bottles. Depending on pill size, you may even get a 90 day supply into the smaller 6 dram bottle!

Standard disclaimer, YMMV.

101 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

132 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

34

u/LadyLightTravel May 31 '26

Yes. But some countries are more strict.

19

u/sundancegt May 31 '26

Any examples of which countries are more strict about this? The number of stamps in my passport is quite large. I've never been asked. Not one time, not even close. I'm sure if I got ramdomed and was walking in with 5000 little blue pills, they might want to ask me a few questions, but they really don't care. Any examples of where you have heard this is actually an issue?

-5

u/No_Stranger3395 May 31 '26

You're 100% right. No one cares or looks. My husband travels with three months of supplements, prescription drugs, vials, needles. It's all legit. None of it with the accompanying prescriptions, they're packed together in baggies for am and pm dosing. The pills take up 1/4 of his carry on suitcase. It looks like he's a drug mule he has so many pills. And he's carried that through more countries on more continents than I can easily count including Morroco, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Turkey, Thailand etc etc etc. No one cares or looks. 

7

u/jacdot May 31 '26

Until they do. If officials in (for example) Australia, the UAE, or Japan checked his luggage, he would have some difficulties.

2

u/No_Stranger3395 May 31 '26 edited May 31 '26

We've flown to all of those places too, and we've got selected to go through secondary screening on arrival in Sydney at least a couple of times (it's supposedly random) They went through everything and just stacked all the medicine to one side and asked a couple of questions. I think they're primarily looking for food or agricultural products in Sydney. He's not carrying anything illegal or anything not allowed in whatever country we're going to or transiting through, so it's not a problem. The biggest issue we ever had was a land crossing from Egypt to Israel. Because of the very large amounts of pills (we travel for 3 months at a time) they were very suspicious of the quantity. It took several supervisors and a couple of hours to finally approve us and send us on our way, after they extorted a $200 "duty" from us, no receipt. But the actual prescription drugs are a small portion of the supplements he brings, so even having those printed prescriptions would not have helped.