Antibiotics You Should Have Before a Crisis Comes Home

Subscribers ask about gold, uranium, and warrant coverage. Few ask who owns the factory that makes their amoxicillin.

Roughly 80% of the active ingredients in American antibiotics trace back to a handful of Chinese manufacturing zones. A single port closure, a single sanctions dispute, a single temporary export restriction, and the supply chain becomes a crisis.

Preppers know that bullets do not treat a wound infection. Bullion doesn’t treat pneumonia. The state has spent a century building a licensing wall around the one category of medicine most likely to matter when supply chains break, and that wall does not come down just because the supply chain did.

I’m a physician but I am not your physician. I am not going to give you a self-treatment guide in a 600-word email. What I will tell you is what to do to get a supply of antibiotics while the pharmacies are still stocked.

First, ask your physician directly: can you prescribe (or recommend) a supply of various antibiotics for an emergency? A wise, thoughtful physician will help you out while providing useful advice about when to use and when not to use antibiotics. A programmed numbnuts will balk and come up with reasons not to help you that make no sense.

Second, get a bunch of different cheap generic antibiotics in as large a quantity as you can. In a full-on crisis, antibiotics will have a lot more monetary and barter value than they do now. In most countries, you can buy them from the pharmacy without a prescription. But in the US and some other “advanced” nations, the doctors have been granted a royal monopoly on the prescription pad.

Most antibiotics in pill form will last years despite the arbitrary expiration date thrown on them. I (mostly) ignore expiration dates on solid pills (although liquid is less stable). Some will lose a few percentage points of potency per year, but that’s negligible in the setting of a standardized dose of 250 mg (or whatever) for either a 110-pound woman or a 250-pound man.

The veterinary and aquarium antibiotic gray market is a potential source, but only as a last resort. Fish-mox and its cousins are chemically identical to human formulations in some cases and are not in others.

The antibiotics that I keep around are numerous, because I’m a doctor. The financial value of my medical expertise is augmented by having meds to treat people with. Absent the meds, I’m like a plumber without a wrench. I can diagnose the leak but can’t do much about it.

But what should the non-physician have on hand?

I suggest starting with the following. I’ll try to write something up on why and when to use these, but for now, try to start rounding them up so you can have them on hand when others don’t. Over the next year, put together a box with these drugs in it. Exclude anything you are allergic to of course.

1) Amoxicillin

2) Amoxicillin/Clavulanate

3) Ciprofloxacin

4) Pepto-Bismol (yes, it’s an antibiotic of sorts)

5) Macrobid/nitrofurantoin

6) Fluconazole (anti-yeast for women)

7) Cephalexin and/or Cefuroxime

8) Azithromycin

9) Doxycycline (expiration date a little more relevant here)

10) Topical Neosporin (triple antibiotic ointment)

11) Silver sulfadiazine (burn cream)

Centralization creates single points of failure, and single points of failure get exploited, whether by Beijing, the FDA, or your own procrastination. Self-sufficiency is inventory management applied to your own survival. It starts with a conversation with your doctor, sure, and it’s a good chance to scout out whether your physician is aligned with how you see the world, or whether he or she is someone who thinks that only physicians should be able to control medications.

I repeat, my list is a starting point for a conversation with your own physician, not a self-prescribing checklist.

If your doctor is…unhelpful…there are a couple of companies that will help you pull this off, albeit more expensively than getting a bunch of scripts from your doctor for generics.

The government that will not let you own a course of antibiotics without a permission slip is the same government that tells you it has your supply chains handled while it starts trade wars and shooting wars and has FDA regulatory machinery oppressing any small company that manufactures medications.

Don’t trust them. Get some meds on hand before you can’t.

Sincerely,

John Hunt, MD
Editor, Doug Casey’s Crisis Investing