The Legislature would do a favor for public safety and strapped police budgets by finally creating a permanent program for disposing of left-over medicines.
That’s the idea behind Senate Bill 5234, this year’s bipartisan effort (it has failed three times previously) to establish a permanent drug take-back program funded by drug makers.
It’s a sensible, straight-forward proposal that’s strongly supported by police as well as organizations that deal with addiction and accidental poisoning. It also has the backing of hospice providers, who often wind up with left-over prescription drugs, water and sewer districts, who are concerned about keeping toxic waste out of sewer systems and Puget Sound, and local pharmacies.
Take-back programs already exist in some Washington counties, including Snohomish, where most police stations accept left-over drugs, including prescription narcotics. But these programs shouldn’t have to be paid for with scarce public dollars. Just as with the recycling of consumer electronics, a program that’s been highly successful here, it’s appropriate for manufacturers to pay for the safe disposal of medicines.
SB 5234 would require the pharmaceutical industry to finance and operate a permanent take-back program, setting up at least one drop-off location in each county and in all cities with a population of 10,000 or more. In areas where a drop-off site couldn’t be arranged, a mail-in system would be established.
The cost, for an industry that sells $4 billion worth of its products in Washington annually, would be modest. A similar program in British Columbia cost less than $500,000 in 2010, and collected more than 66 tons of unused drugs.
That’s a lot of potentially dangerous pills kept out of the hands of young people, or others for whom they weren’t prescribed. Supporters of the bill, testifying in Olympia, noted that youth admissions to state-funded treatment for prescription opiates are 19 times higher than they were a decade ago.
As in previous years, the pharmaceutical industry opposes the bill, arguing that there’s no evidence such programs are effective, and that people with unused prescription drugs already dispose of them appropriately — in the household trash.
We think the industry is dodging what it should claim as its rightful responsibility. British Columbia’s experience shows that even if such programs don’t eliminate the problem entirely, they put a significant dent in it.
Don’t get us wrong. The pharmaceutical industry produces wonderful medicines that improve lives. But as we’ve argued before, some also have serious societal side-effects that must be addressed. It’s appropriate for the industry that profits from these products to foot that bill.
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