Go look at your medicine cabinet. Go ahead, I’ll wait for you to come back.
Back? Okay, good. Let’s talk.
Odds are, in there with the headache medicine and your blood pressure pills, there’s a bunch of other things. Bottles half-filled with medication that you don’t take anymore. I know that’s what ours looks like. Bottles of medications that my wife and I were put on to manage various issues, ended up not being helpful, and that remain sitting in the drawer along with the ones we actually do take on a regular basis.
Then there’s what I like to call the Bottle of Misfit Pills. It’s an old, empty prescription bottle where odd pills that end up in the drawer, pills left over from prescriptions that we never completely used but that neither of us can successfully identify anymore, go to rest and never be used again. To say the least, it’s a mess.
Now, I need to take them to be disposed of safely. (Obviously, you should never just throw old medicine in the trash!) Do you know where to take your used prescriptions?
Do you?
Give up?
You would, naturally, take it over to the Sheriff’s Department, down on New Salem Highway in Murfreesboro. Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?
How did I find this out? On the Sheriff’s website?
Actually, I found it as a brief sentence on the county Solid Waste Department’s website. Oh, it’s also on the county Environmental Education department website. The Sheriff’s web site makes no mention of the program at all.
Safely disposing of medicine is a critical part of the personal and environmental health of our community. Leaving them to sit in our homes raises the risk of a family member or guest being poisoned, as well as makes those medications — particularly painkillers — to be stolen, sold, or abused. Improperly disposing of medicine in the trash or directly into the water supply compromises the health of the environment by potentially tainting water supplies and doing harm to the fish and wildlife that both makeup the natural beauty of our community, and serve as an important part of our county’s economic prosperity through hunting and fishing.
We must have secure dropboxes for medicine in all public facilities — post offices, libraries, courts, and more — that people visit frequently. We should invest in mobile drug and medical waste disposal for the community, to make it easier and safer for residents to get rid of old prescriptions, needles, testing supplies, and more. We must make it convenient to the lives and schedules of others to safely get rid of these materials, and must begin to make that investment now.
We owe it to ourselves to make it known and readily accessible to everyone in our community how to dispose of their medications. It may only be one step forward in solving the prescription drug crisis in Tennessee, but it’s an absolutely essential and critical one.
Let’s fix this mess. Join the movement for People-Powered local government in Rutherford County by helping elect me to our County Commission. You can find out more about my campaign, help spread the word, and chip in to help me win here:
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