Old Meds – Good Riddance (transcript)

By Kim Green

Last week, the Dickson Police Department took in a massive haul of drugs – more than eighty pounds of pills and capsules. But here’s the twist: it wasn’t a bust.

Residents of Dickson and surrounding counties voluntarily turned in their expired and unused prescription drugs. WPLN’s Kim Green reports on the opportunity for people to empty their medicine cabinets safely and legally.

Audio for this feature is available here.

Interviews:
• Emily Burgess
• Officer David Cole, Dickson Police Dept. Crime Prevention
• Carrie Plummer, Instructor, VU School of Nursing

Green: In a Kroger parking lot in Dickson, sixty-nine-year-old Emily Burgess hands plastic grocery bags bulging with drugs to a city police officer. But he doesn’t arrest her.

Emily Burgess: “Haha! Since 1997!”

Green: That’s more than thirteen years’ worth of prescription medicines Burgess has been stockpiling behind her bathroom mirror. She says until now, she wasn’t sure what do to with them all.

Burgess: “I had been looking for many years of how to get rid of them. They always said never flush them down the commode, don’t put them in the landfill, so, what are you gonna do?”

Green: And Tennessee’s unused drugs can clutter up a lot of landfills. A 2008 Blue Cross Blue Shield report lists Tennessee as number two for prescription drug use, behind West Virginia. Tennesseans average sixteen point nine prescriptions per person every year.

Dickson police officer David Cole says all those leftover medications can become a big problem for law enforcement. That’s why he’s ecstatic about the drug disposal event.

Cole: “This is getting expired and unused meds that people don’t need off the street and that takes that temptation away for somebody else to steal them. They’re not gonna be sold on the corner, and also keeps them out of our schools. That’s a powerful thing.”

Green: Besides the danger that a thief – or the grandkids – might pilfer drugs from the medicine chest or the trash, there’s another risk in keeping old, expired meds around, a risk that disproportionately affects the elderly.

Carrie Plummer: “It’s not uncommon to have an older adult come to the emergency room who’s actually taken either the wrong medication or too much of a medication, or a bad combination of medications.”

Green: Vanderbilt nursing school instructor Carrie Plummer says because older people tend take more medications, they’re also more prone to make dangerous dosage mistakes.

Plummer: “And I think one of the problems honestly is that if you are taking ten medications and you don’t throw away the medications that you were supposed to stop taking and you put the new meds right next door to them, it’s very easy to get confused.”

Green: The Centers for Disease Control reports that people over sixty-five are twice as likely to visit the ER because of these ‘adverse drug events.’ But cleaning out the medicine cabinet is no simple matter. Although levels are hard to track, flushed pharmaceuticals can find their way into the water supply. And the DEA won’t let folks turn prescription drugs over to anyone but a law enforcement officer.

(SOUND: Drug Take-back event)

In Dickson, policemen transfer scores of pill bottles to a tent where Lipscomb University pharmacy students sort and categorize piles of orange, white, and blue pills.

(SOUND: pills falling into containers)

Green: By day’s end, they’ve counted more than forty-one thousand pills, nearly two thousand of them controlled substances like OxyContin and hydrocodone. The estimated street value of the day’s take? More than fifty-six-hundred dollars. But those pills will never make their way to the street because volunteers incinerated them all on-site in a souped-up fifty-gallon drum.

For Nashville Public Radio, I’m Kim Green.

ANNOUNCER: Right now, there aren’t any coordinated efforts across Tennessee to host these kinds of drug disposal events on a regular basis. It’s up to towns and neighborhoods to organize these efforts individually, at a grassroots level.