Drugs (PHOTO: Jackie Johnson)
A reminder to include a sweep of the medicine cabinet in your spring cleaning plans.
Locations around the state will be hosting drug take-back events this Saturday, where people can drop off unwanted or expired prescriptions for safe disposal. Attorney General Brad Schimel says the spring and fall events have helped get a lot of dangerous drugs out of homes, with over 83,000 pounds collected and safely disposed of last year.
The effort to collect old medications started out of concerns about those pills being taken and abused by others. Schimel notes that 70 percent of those abusing prescription drugs got them from a family member or friend, who may have picked them up from a medicine cabinet. “None of us would leave a loaded handgun sitting on the counter with teenagers coming in and out of the house, but a lot of us don’t think twice about what we have in our medicine cabinet…and what we have in our medicine cabinet is killing a lot more people than guns.”
The statewide takeback events are held twice a year, in the spring and the fall. Although, many local police departments have 24-7 drop boxes available throughout the year. The state Department of Justice has a list of drop-off sites available online.