DON'T THROW IT OUT

May 10, 2010

At least don’t throw it out until you have done some very important things. Those things could prevent you from having some difficult situations.

This isn’t about fly fishing, so you can tune out if you wish - but I’ll bet you will encounter this problem yourself at some point.

I received a phone call from the pharmacy I’ve been using for a long time, about ten years. The gal on the other end asked if I had called a prescription in for a narcotic. The reason she had called was because the prescription was ‘old’ so the pharmacy had called my doctor about it.

I told her I had not called it in, and I had not taken it for years. As we talked it became even stranger.

As you may know we are moving and in the process I threw out some empty medicine bottles. We all do, sometimes we ‘save’ the empty bottles thinking we’ll have a wonderful use for them. I’ve carried one in my vest for cigarette butts when I was smoking, and have scooped up a bug or two in them as well. But in this case I was just getting rid of stuff.

I put the old medicine bottles in the garbage. The recycle container specifically says no brown medicine bottles, so in the garbage they went.

I don’t know where it happened, but between my house and wherever our garbage goes, someone went through the garbage and grabbed the medicine bottles. Then they tried to have the prescription filled. That’s when the pharmacy called me.

I asked the gal at the pharmacy if I should call the police - she said no, you don’t have any real evidence - we know someone tried to fill the prescription but they used my name, we don’t know who “they” were. The pharmacy did tell me to call my garbage pick-up company and tell them what happened. I felt really strange calling them but I did it. The person who answered the phone was very nice and told me this wasn’t the first time it had happened. 

She advised me to remove the labels from the brown prescription bottles in fact to even soak them in water if I couldn’t get them off. Since we are moving a bunch of stuff is getting junked, and some of the old bottles will go as well. Unfortunately some have left-over meds in them and that’s a problem too. What to do with left-over medicines?

A couple of years ago I found a bunch of accumulated old medicine bottles in a cupboard and called my pharmacy and asked what to do with the left-over pills. Locally here in Washington there isn’t any “official” way to dispose of them. The garbage people told me to dump them in the garbage. I’ve also heard to flush them - but I know that is wrong because it is already affecting fish and wildlife. Male fish in the Potomac River (Washington D.C.) are developing eggs, which is supposedly the result of all the birth-control pills passing through sewage disposal systems flushing into the river.

Livingston MT just had the first Park County prescription drug take-back. The program was initiated by the Montana Department of Criminal Investigation. Local sponsors included the Park County Sheriff's Office, Livingston Police Department and Southwest Chemical Dependency Program. Sheriff Allan Lutes said the program has several goals. One is to keep potentially dangerous drugs out of landfills.
"This program gets unwanted, outdated drugs out of homes, so they can be properly disposed of without contaminating the environment," Lutes said. Another goal is “to keep painkillers from being stolen and used illegally”, he said. "No questions are asked" when people bring drugs in. No names are collected and all collections are anonymous. "We hope to make this a regular event," the sheriff said. The drug take-back was a big success, according to Sheriff Allan Lutes with more than 7 pounds of drugs collected, not including containers. (Information provided by Liz Kearney of the Livingston Enterprise.)

A few years ago a church in a neighboring town here in Washington collected unused or left-over medicines and sent them to a mission in Africa. It became too dangerous to have some of the medicines at the church and the program was dropped. Another sign of our times I fear.

You might check to see if your area does have some means of disposing of these ticking time bombs. Putting them in the garbage is a problem, and you can’t safely bury or flush them.

Our miracle drugs have turned into monsters. Unless you know you are safe in doing so, don’t throw them out.

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