ABSTRACT

Looking to the future, the ‘‘utopia’’ of the drug distribution system lies in packaging and storage practices. It is critical that drug composition be verified and that standards be established to guarantee safety and efficacy of a given drug when it leaves the manufacturing facility. From its primitive beginnings, packaging has allowed people to separate the production of consumables from their use, both temporally and physically. In fact, packaging has enabled the optimization of the geographical distribution of consumables. Early societies used packaging systems to facilitate the preservation and transportation of foods. Glass became the most widely accepted pharmaceutical packaging material because of its relative abundance and economic feasibility as well as its desirable isolation properties. For the compendial definitions, a reference to packaging is often interchanged with containers. Thus a packaging system is synonymous with a container closure system.