Selling a deceased person's medication on Wallapop is not legal

A deceased person's medication is not for sale or auction

What do you do with the half-finished blister packs of someone who has just died? The answer circulating in a recent conversation is not the common-sense one: the family of the deceased announced that they were going to list and auction a huge amount of their medication on Wallapop. The body had been found on the floor of the home, covered in urine and vomit, according to the account of the person who broke the news. The same message that closes a life unwittingly opens an segarro public health question: what is in the deceased's medicine cabinet.

Can you sell a deceased person's medication on Wallapop?

No. Dispensing prescription drugs is reserved for authorised channels and second-hand platforms exclude medicines from their permitted items. None of that stops the listing from being framed as a liquidatable inheritance, and that is where the problem begins. Whoever buys an open package does not know what they are buying: no guarantee of proper storage, no cold chain, and no way to check that the box contains what the box says. The auction ends up being the least of it.

Two months of lorazepam in one week

The same conversation offers the other half of the story, and it has nothing to do with resale. Someone mentions that they told friends they took two months' worth of "loras" in a single week; "loras" is lorazepam, an anxiolytic in the benzodiazepine group. The detail is not presented as a health problem, but as a figure to drop in casual conversation. And it describes exactly the pattern that turns a short-term treatment into a dependency: doses that go up, intervals that shorten, stashes that empty out. With benzodiazepines, unsupervised withdrawal is as bad an idea as excess.

The pill drawer as a grey market

The business nobody audits is at home. Another message jokes about pallets of pills for PrEP, pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV, to illustrate the volume of medication that piles up unchecked. Behind the joke lies something prosaic: chronic treatments, peine packages, prescriptions renewed even when boxes pile up unused. Nobody measures that household stock, and that is why nobody questions it. The sensible option for leftovers is the collection points available at pharmacies; resale and the drain are the two worst.

From death to the joke in three messages

The conversation goes from the lifeless body to the joke in a couple of lines. It happens in any bar: dark humour as the first layer of grief, may the earth rest lightly upon you, and on we go. The joke, however, covers up the only practical decision left to make, which nobody has made yet: what to do with the medication the deceased left half-finished. While they argue about whether to auction it, both the legal and the health question remain unclaimed.

In the end, the most profitable move would be the one nobody will make: taking stock of the drawer before deciding what to keep, what to take to the pharmacy, and what to list on a platform that will not allow it.