For making it a headache to open aspirin.
If you have found yourself looking for a hammer to finish the job after struggling with a childproof pill container, trust me, you’re not alone. We have the Consumer Product Safety Commission to thank for our lid-popping problems. U.S. law has required locking mechanisms on all potentially dangerous products since 1970 for child protection.
I guess the question is: Is this necessary? I am not anti-child by any means, but how many lives is this saving? If you personally don’t have any problems opening these containers, then just wait until you become elderly. Eventually, you will be shaking your cane at these hard-to-open pill bottles. Don’t forget, you will have more bottles to open when you’re old, and dexterity decreases with arthritis.
When I was a toddler, I didn’t even know pill containers existed. They were high up in the cabinets, a bit out of reach for a sub-three-footer. I was more into the big shiny bottles under the sink! I could reach those things easily and dump them all over the floor. Ironically, you are hard-pressed to find a pill bottle without a safety cap, but most cleaning products are a few twists or a couple squirts away from a call to poison control.
Yet the “protection” we do have just makes life more difficult. Most households rarely need safety devices like these. The CPSC obviously didn’t do its job very well in the first place if it missed security on the more dangerous products. If you were really trying to protect toddlers, you would know it’s easier to get into accessible cleaning products. I guess I should be careful what I wish for before someone sues the big chemical companies and padlocks become mandatory on all kitchen cabinets.
Parents should just lock up all potentially harmful things and call it a day! (Just like you would do with alcohol when your kids become teenagers.)