Take-back bill a prescription for safety

Published 1:20 pm Friday, February 3, 2012

The family medicine cabinet is increasingly becoming a deadly drug dealer; stuffed with expired and leftover prescription and over-the-counter medicines that can be dangerous to your family’s health and to our environment.

For once, there is a solution that is simple, straightforward, cost-effective and endorsed by as wide a coalition of organizations as you will ever see, including those of us in law enforcement. It’s the Secure Medicine Return Bill, Senate Bill 5234, which would create the state’s first permanent drug take back program, one that would be fully funded by the pharmaceutical companies.

Illegal drugs like marijuana, cocaine and methamphetamines are a huge source of worry for parents. But the reality is that prescription drug abuse is the fastest growing drug problem in the nation. Many teens mistakenly think prescription and over-the-counter medicines are safer to abuse than illegal drugs. Three out of five teenage drug abusers say prescription pain relievers are easy to get — not in some dark alley, but from their parents’ bathrooms.

And law enforcement agencies across the state have first-hand experience with the dangers these leftover prescription and OTC drugs pose.

The state Department of Health finds Washington has one of the highest rates in the nation of teenagers using prescription pain medicines to get high and drug overdoses in our state have surpassed car crashes as the leading cause of accidental death. Meanwhile, fatal poisonings increased 395 percent from 1990 to 2006, with 85 percent of those involving medicines.

Reliable studies suggest that anywhere from 10 to 30 percent (hundreds of thousands of pounds) of all drugs go unused. Once they become unwanted, medicines designed to improve our lives can become devastating destroyers. The problem goes beyond drug abuse and accidental poisoning. Leftover medicine is toxic waste when it’s flushed, poured down the drain or dumped in the garbage, where it can end up polluting our waters, hurting aquatic life and contaminating water supplies.

A voluntary system in place in parts of our state has already proven to be popular and useful to consumers, with more than 160,000 pounds of leftover drugs returned and safely destroyed since 2006. But these voluntary programs are nonexistent in many parts of the state and endangered by government cutbacks in others. Medicine take-back programs like the one that SB 5234 would create offer the only secure and environmentally sound way to dispose of leftover or expired drugs that contribute to the epidemic of drug abuse and accidental poisonings.

As we have already seen with the success of mandatory electronics take back programs in Washington, manufacturers can effectively and efficiently operate take-back programs. Pharmaceutical companies, which make and sell $4 billion worth of medicines every year in our state alone, have an equal responsibility to help keep families safe. And unlike financially-strapped law enforcement, they have the resources.

In British Columbia, drug manufacturers operate and fund such a take back program. In 2010, the B.C. program safely disposed of more than 66 tons of hazardous unused medicines. The price tag was just $468,000 (U.S.).Yet despite the relatively low cost of operating such a take-back program in our state, a similar bill failed during last year’s legislative session.

The Washington Association of Sheriffs &Police Chiefs supports medicine take-back legislation which will try to move its way through this current 2012 legislative session, costing taxpayers nothing. In addition to those of us in law enforcement, more than 240 organizations — health organizations, environmental groups, drug stores, local governments, consumer groups and others — agree a secure statewide medicine return program is seriously needed.

Our continued failure to act is a prescription for disaster.

John Lovick is the Snohomish County sheriff.