Would you like to clean out your medicine cabinet but don’t know the best way? If you’re like most people, you have collected quite a few drugs that are now expired or no longer needed. You may think your only disposal options are to flush the medications down the drain or throw them in the trash. Neither one of these methods is wise or safe, however, for a number of reasons. Click here to read why it is critically important to dispose of medication properly.

You can either put your pills and capsules in a resealable bag or leave them in the original containers. If you do bring prescription vials they will be destroyed too. If you are disposing of liquid medication, please leave the medication in the bottle and put the bottle inside a resealable bag to avoid leakage.

You don’t have to complete any forms or sign any papers, so you can maintain complete privacy.

After the drugs are collected at the hospital, they will be safely disposed of by a professional medical waste handling company.

» The Environment: Please don’t flush! Recent research has uncovered some disturbing facts about pharmaceuticals in our environment. Flushed drugs are much more persistent than anyone ever realized.

The sewage treatment plants currently in use in this country are not designed to remove dissolved drugs from our wastewater. That means that the pharmaceuticals we flush end up being released back out into lakes and streams. Our drinking water is then drawn from those same lakes and streams. Water filtration plants do not specifically remove pharmaceuticals either, so some of these persistent pharmaceuticals do end up flowing out of your tap and into your drinking glass. Click here for more information about drugs found in the water supply.

We don’t yet know what the long-term health risks are from a lifetime of exposure to the small concentrations of pharmaceuticals found in drinking water. However, we do know that exposure to drugs found in waterways is having a serious, negative impact on fish and other aquatic life. For example, researchers across the country are discovering fish laden with estrogen and antidepressants. Many of those exhibit major neurological or physiological changes, like male fish that have developed female reproductive organs.

» Don’t toss it out either! Throwing drugs in the trash is not a good disposal option either. Children or scavenging animals can find the medication and ingest it. Drugs can also endanger sanitation workers if not packaged correctly for disposal. Finally, drugs often dissolve in landfills over time and wind up leaching into groundwater anyway.

» Abuse and accidental poisoning: The danger with throwing old medications in the trash (or just keeping them in the house forever) is that other people can find them and take them. Prescription medication abuse by teens and young adults is a growing problem in the United States. There has been much media attention lately on the alarming phenomenon of “pharm parties”, parties where teens take combinations of prescription drugs scavenged from their family medicine cabinets. Not surprisingly, the consequences can be tragic. In the Partnership for a Drug Free America’s annual tracking study:

• 1 in 5 teens has abused a prescription pain medication
• 1 in 5 report abusing prescription stimulants and tranquilizers
• 1 in 10 has abused cough medication

» Protect our senior citizens: Kids and teens aren’t the only population at risk. Senior citizens may also become confused about their medications. They might accidentally take expired medications or drugs that are no longer prescribed for them. In 2004, almost half of all Americans were taking one prescription drug. Five out of six people aged 65 and older were taking at least one drug, and half of that age group was taking three or more medications. That’s a lot of prescriptions to manage and dispose of properly.

For your family’s sake, it is really worth this small effort to get rid of medication your family no longer needs, and to get rid of it safely.

» Your privacy

Finally, when you throw drug vials in a landfill, you expose yourself to the possibility that someone will get their hands on your personal information. Believe it or not, there are people who will go through trash looking for personal information to help them in identity theft schemes. Why put the information there in the first place?

We hope that you will take this opportunity to participate in this innovative drug disposal program and we appreciate your concern for our safety and the environment. We welcome any comments you may have.

If you would like more information about the issue of pharmaceutical disposal, you may want to visit some of these links: