Barbital (CAS 57-44-3): storage and disposal

In a university department, barbital usually sits at the back of a shared reagent cupboard, in a brown glass bottle bought decades ago and filed under an old name. Nobody treats it as a drug, which is exactly why it goes unnoticed through changes of staff and lab moves. Once found, it should be locked up in the department's existing controlled drugs arrangement if there is one, with a record of holding kept up to date. If no such arrangement exists, tell your safety lead the same day and leave the bottle where it is until they advise. Any ready-mixed buffer with it should be recorded too, with its label left intact. Sodium barbital bottles count as well.

An old paper label, brown with age and giving a name nobody recognises, is usually what you see first. Barbital is a white crystalline powder that shows few visible signs of change, so it can look fresh after a very long time on a shelf. Caking points to damp getting past a tired cap, and a corroded metal lid is not unusual on bottles this old. A liquid buffer ages much less well than the dry solid. Cloudiness, sediment or floating growth in a bottle of buffer are common findings. Be careful with faded handwritten labels: a bottle marked only with a buffer name may still contain barbital, and that should be raised as a possibility.

This does not go through our standard collection route. It is arranged by manual enquiry, and never goes down the drain or into general waste.

Grouping is where barbital catches people out. It looks like an ordinary organic buffer salt, so it tends to land on a list for a lab pack with the rest of the shelf, when in fact a general chemical collection does not cover a controlled drug. Take it off that list and send a manual enquiry, since it is not quoted online. A store assessment is worthwhile if the bottle came from an unsorted legacy cupboard, as neighbouring old bottles may raise questions too. Destruction falls under the Misuse of Drugs Regulations 2001, and whether an authorised witness is needed depends on the holder's circumstances, including any licence conditions. In a university, the discarded solid usually takes 16 05 06*. Do not open it, and do not empty any buffer into a drain.

Usually held as: legacy buffer stock.

Tell us the container size and how many you hold. An estimate is enough to start with, and some items cannot be priced until someone has looked at them.