By Mary Jane Dittmar
Have you ever looked at an ever-growing pile of prescription bottles containing medications that you or a member of your family no longer take and wondered, What is the best way to dispose of them? I have been in this predicament several times–plastic bags filled with medication bottles that are half-empty, half-full, and even totally full and never opened. The latter situation can occur when you recently had a medication refilled and your have a visit to the doctor scheduled for a short time later. During the visit, the doctor recommends discontinuing or replacing the medication.
I learned too late that once a prescription is filled, even if you did not yet pick up the refill and the newly filled, unopened container is still in the bag at the pharmacy, you nevertheless must still purchase that particular supply of medication. The same holds true if you have the prescription refilled by mail-order. Even if the container in the mail and has not arrived at your home yet, you still cannot send the medication back for a refund. You have to keep it. You can wind up with a large quantity of pills and liquids that you can no longer use and must discard.
According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), “Most drugs can be thrown in the household trash, but consumers should take certain precautions before tossing them out.”
Guidelines for Drug Disposal
The FDA, working with the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), developed federal guidelines for properly disposing of prescription drugs. The ONDCP issued them in February 2007 and updated them in October 2009. A summary of these federal guidelines is below.
Follow disposal instructions on the drug label or patient information pamphlet that accompanies the medication, if one is present. Do not flush prescription drugs down the toilet unless the label or product information specifically recommends it.
Take advantage of community drug take-back programs in which you bring unused drugs to a central location for proper disposal. Call your city or county government’s household trash and recycling service (see blue pages in phone book) to see if a take-back program is available in your community. The Drug Enforcement Administration, working with state and local law enforcement agencies, is sponsoring National Prescription Drug Take Back Days throughout the United States.
In the absence of instructions on the drug label and a take-back program in your area, do the following: (1) Throw the medications in the household trash after taking the drugs out of their original containers and mixing them with an undesirable substance, such as used coffee grounds or kitty litter. (Children and pets will find them less appealing, and people who may intentionally go through your trash will find them more difficult to recognize.) (2) Put them in a sealable bag, an empty can, or another container to prevent the medication from leaking or breaking out of a garbage bag.
To protect your identify and the privacy of the patient’s health information, scratch out all identifying information on the prescription label to make it unreadable before throwing out the container. Do not give medications to friends. A drug that works for you could be dangerous for someone else.
When in doubt about how to dispose of drugs properly, consult your pharmacist.
Why the Precautions?
Disposal instructions on the label are part of the FDA’s “risk mitigation” strategy, says Captain Jim Hunter, R.Ph., M.P.H., senior program manager on FDA’s Controlled Substance staff. When a drug contains instructions to flush it down the toilet, he says, it’s because the FDA, working with the manufacturer, has determined this method to be the most appropriate route of disposal that presents the least risk to safety.
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Photos courtesy of photos8.com. |
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Environmental Concerns
There are some concerns that flushing drugs down the toilet or disposing of them down the sink can leave residues in the public water system. A discussion of this topic and a frequently updated FDA list of drug labels that contain disposal directions recommending flushing or disposal down the sink are at FDA’s Web page on Disposal of Unused Medicines7.
The FDA’s Consumer Updates page features the latest on all FDA-regulated products.
MAY 8-14: FOOD ALLERGY AWARENESS WEEK
This week, explain Daniel Rotrosen, M.D., and Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) National Institutes of Health (NIH), “acknowledges those who live every day with the concern that their exposure to certain foods may have the potential to trigger a life-threatening allergic reaction.”
The NIAID joined with 34 professional organizations, patient advocacy groups, and federal agencies to develop The Guidelines for the Diagnosis and Management of Food Allergy in the United States: Report of the NIAID-Sponsored Expert Panel, which were published in December 2010 and are available at www.niaid.nih.gov/topics/foodAllergy/clinical. A summary of the key points of this document will be published for patients this summer.
Food Allergy Awareness Week was established in 1997 by the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network (FAAN), a patient and family advocacy and education organization. This year, the Food Allergy Initiative, another advocacy group, joins the FAAN in recognizing the commemorative week. Both the FAAN and the FAI participated in the development of the food allergy guidelines.
For more information about food allergy, visit the NIAID’s Food Allergy Web portal at www.niaid.nih.gov/topics/foodallergy.
The NIAID conducts and supports research–at the NIH, throughout the United States, and worldwide–to study the causes of infectious and immune-mediated diseases and to develop better means of preventing, diagnosing and treating these illnesses.
Mary Jane Dittmar is senior associate editor of Fire Engineering and conference manager of FDIC. Before joining the magazine in January 1991, she served as editor of a trade magazine in the health/nutrition market and held various positions in the educational and medical advertising fields. She has a bachelor’s degree in English/journalism and a master’s degree in communication arts.
