THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, June 19, 1995 TAG: 9506190037
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines
In a noble endeavor, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has voted to require that new child-resistant tops be put on medicine bottles so adults will have a less frustrating time opening them.
Regulators say that the new caps, due to appear next year, will be safer for children because many people who had trouble removing the caps just left them off.
Commission Chairman Ann Brown said studies show that existing packages pose problems for older people, many of whom haven't the strength to open them.
I regard that as a canard.
It is not so much that some elders lack strength to open caps as it is we are short on manual dexterity.
We have difficulty lining up the arrow on the lid with the arrow on the neck of the bottle.
So now and then it is in our brains, not our brawn, that we are remiss, which, come to think of it, does not offer us much comfort.
Younger people also are not always immune from being check-mated by butt-headed bottles.
A colleague, just out of college, says she simply asks the pharmacist for regular bottle caps on prescriptions. That never occurred to me, which shows how much smarter she is.
The tight bottle caps perplexed none other than Richard Nixon. The man who was so manipulative that his admirers termed him Machiavelli and foes called him ``Tricky Dick'' couldn't outwit a bottle of aspirin.
Now, if a bottle cap is so balky that even a president, tricky or not, can't operate it, it is time we put our technology in reverse and undo it.
I continue to paw at the child-proof cap like an aspiring orangutan.
One Saturday, when scientists were saying we should take an aspirin, not an apple, a day to improve our health, I spent an hour trying to twist, pry, and gnaw the cap off a plastic bottle of aspirin.
At last, I went around to the hardware store and asked my friend Phil for a sledgehammer.
``Guy,'' said Phil, who regards me as an accident about to happen, ``please tell me you are not going to do anything imprudent with this sledgehammer.''
``Phil, one thing I can assure you that I am not going to do us is hit my foot,'' I said. ``I have always wanted a sledgehammer.''
Which is the approximate truth.
He let me have it, ruefully.
He'd have been happy to open the bottle, without comment; but some things one must do for oneself, if one is going to hold up one's head in society as well as one's foot if the sledge misses the mark.
At home, I placed the plastic bottle on a brick in the back yard, and brought down the sledge, ka-wham, with all my might.
It smashed the brick as well as the plastic bottle.
I concluded that the remedial effect of the aspirin was offset by the exertions getting to it. by CNB