Pill Drop-Offs Aid Effort to Clear Medicine Cabinets

From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., people young and old delivered bag after bag of pills, including the types of powerful painkillers and anti-anxietydrugs that theDrug Enforcement Administration, which coordinated the program nationally, was hoping for. More than anything, the goal was to empty homes of legal but dangerous drugs that the authorities say are driving addiction and crime around the country.

“We’re getting a cocktail of just about everything,” said Milton Tyrrell, a special agent for the D.E.A. in Worcester who was supervising the collection in Russell Park.

Some of those who showed up did not want to identify themselves or discuss what brought them out, silently dumping their pills into boxes provided by the D.E.A. and hurrying off. Others said they were dropped off drugs that had belonged to relatives who were now dead, or elderly people who had let medicines pile up in their homes for too long.

“My 99-year-old aunt read about it in the paper and cleaned out all her medicine cabinets,” said Judy Hayden of Worcester, who brought mostly blood-pressure medications.“Thank God they’re doing this, because it seems like the whole city is on pills.”

Nationally, there were more than 4,000 drop-off locations– mostly police departments, but also sports complexes, big-box stores, strip malls and even a race track. In Worcester, Mr. Tyrrell listed Vicodin, Percocet and Lorazepam, which is taken for anxiety, among the drugs collected, as well as less potent medications that had been sitting in people’s bathrooms for decades.

Mary Whitehead Santos of Charlton, who dropped off two shopping bags full of pills, said her son, a physician, had talked her into doing so. Some of the drugs she deposited into the collection boxes had been prescribed in the mid-80s, she said.

“I kept hanging onto them thinking,‘They’ve got to be good for something,”’ she said, laughing.“My son kind of forced me out here, I guess. I’m not bringing the hard-core stuff that they’re looking for, but it’s good to finally be rid of it.”

In East Boston, a neighborhood of Boston that has struggled with addiction problems, the police station serving as a drop-off spot did not see much activity– possibly, officials there said, because the city only got the word out over the last week or two. Still, Joe Favale, a retired police officer, brought two bags that his girlfriend and a friend of hers had assembled. The bags contained three bottles of oxycodone, a highly addictive painkiller, as well as drugs formigraine headaches,asthma,acid refluxand other ailments.

“She wouldn’t throw it out because she was concerned for the environment,” Mr. Favale said of his girlfriend.“I myself was totally unaware that you shouldn’t throw the stuff away. When I have a couple of pills left over, I’m used to putting them down the garbage disposal.”

While the main goal of the take-back day was to reduce the volume of pills in households, law enforcement officials said the environmental benefits were important, too. The collected drugs will be incinerated instead of flushed down toilets, which can release them into the water supply.

Mr. Favale, who said he retired from the Boston Police Department in 2007, said he was taken aback by how big a problem prescription drug trafficking had become.

“The whole time I worked here in the 80s and 90s,” he said,“the concern was street drugs– reefer, cocaine, stuff like that.”

Matthew Murphy, assistant special agent in charge of the D.E.A.’s New England field division in Boston, said he had heard anecdotally that many sites in the region had an“overwhelming” response.

Mr. Murphy said that in Massachusetts, the National Guard would transport all of the drugs collected to five incineration sites and most would be destroyed by day’s end.

“We didn’t know what to expect,” he said.“But the public has been great; we had to go to trash bags in some cases because we ran out of boxes. We’ve had people show up and bring pharmaceutical products they’ve had around for 30 years.”

Mr. Murphy said he had heard about oxycontin and oxycodone, some of the most addictive opiate painkillers, being dropped off at several locations around New England. Even if only a small amount of that type of drug was collected, he said, the whole effort would be worthwhile.

“Any amount of that is great to get off the streets,” he said.“For us, that’s huge.”

Source