Politics & Government
Keeping Teens From Experimenting With Grandma's Painkillers
The Niles Police event kept prescription drugs from contaminating the water supply, and removed a common source of abuse for teens.
The collected nearly 250 pounds of expired or unused narcotics Saturday as part of its Prescription Drug Take-Back Day, a semiannual event the department sponsors to help residents properly dispose of unwanted medications.
Most people have leftover drugs when “someone dies and they don’t want the medication in the house,” said Rita Casabuena, a pharmacy technician at , 5600 W. Touhy Ave., Niles. She also said prescriptions usually only have a shelf-life of a year or two until they become less effective or expire.
The police department works with the Drug Enforcement Administration to collect drugs that might otherwise present a public safety hazard or increase environmental pollution, said Sgt. Robert Tornabene. The medications dropped off at the station were “predominantly pills”, Tornabene said, including oxycontin—a powerful pain killer that can become addictive if abused.
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Earlier:
The Maine Community Youth Assistance Foundation sponsored three police departments--Niles, Park Ridge and Des Plaines-- to remove prescription drugs from homes so kids do not get hold of them, said Cheryll DeYoung, MCYAF communications coordinator.
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Our goal is to keep our youth drug- and alcohol-free,” DeYoung said. “We’ve discovered if you reduce access to drugs and alcohol, it’s one very easy way to keep kids from using them.”
From an environmental standpoint, collection programs help keep potentially hazardous chemicals out of landfills and sewer systems, which may seep into the public’s drinking water supply, according to the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant, a program that monitors Lake Michigan water health.
"When I grew up, everybody was told to just flush it down the toilet,” DeYoung said. “Even small traces of medications can get into our water supply.”
An inventory of unused drugs can also lead to better management in physician prescribing practices, the IISG said.
While there is the threat that drug remnants could drain into the ground water supply, Dave Walters, manager of waste reduction at the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, said drugs found in the surface water pose a greater hazard to the organisms living there. Hormones that end up in the waters where fish and other water organisms live can have a long-term effect on their DNA and have created ecosystems with higher percentages of female fish to males, he said.
"It’s very difficult for toxicologists to determine exactly which drug in the water is causing a problem,” Walters said. “We look at hormones, and birth control pills are a major culprit.”
Medications collected at the Niles Police Department and other collection spots are taken to “highly regulated” plants where they are incinerated at very high temperatures, he said.
“We believe that collecting and destroying them is a much more environmentally-friendly way of doing things than throwing it in the trash or flushing it down the toilet,” Walters said.
He said the EPA has done collection programs for the past five years responding to national studies that indicated trace amounts of drugs in the drinking water supply. But in Illinois tests, Walters said, the numbers that came back were “very, very low.” “We haven’t seen any concentrations (of medications) in the groundwater, but it’s certainly worth trying to prevent in the future.”
