DEA accepting vape products for Drug Take Back Day
Hundreds of people in Massachusetts brought in their expired prescriptions to local police stations Saturday as part of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s 18th National Prescription Drug Take Back Day.
“We know there are a lot of opioids and other dangerous drugs that end up in people’s medicine cabinets and the risk of that is they get diverted, especially with teens. That’s similar to having a loaded gun in your home,” said Francis Melaragni, a professor at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Science.
According to the 2018 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, nearly 10 million Americans misused controlled prescription drugs, a majority of which were obtained from family and friends, often from the home medicine cabinet.
On Saturday, nearly 200 police stations across the state partnered with the DEA as a way to prevent those drugs from falling into the wrong hands.
“I think it’s very important, this is something we can’t do on our own. I’ve been looking at some of the social media posts and it looks like we’re getting a good number of boxes at the stations,” said Special Agent Timothy Desmond with the Boston branch of the DEA. “It definitely feels good.”
In October 2018, over 4,700 law enforcement agencies across the country participated in a drug take-back event and collected a total of 914,236 pounds of prescription drugs, according to the DEA.
Since starting 10 years ago, the DEA’s twice-yearly Drug Take Back Day has collected more than 11 million pounds of expired, unused and unwanted prescription medications.
“We need all hands on deck to try to clean things up, because we’re talking about something that can help stop people from going down the path of opioid addiction,” Melaragni said. “These types of events are nothing but helpful, it’s unfortunate we don’t have them more often.”
According to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, there have been over 600 confirmed opioid-related overdose deaths in the state over the first six months of 2019, with DPH estimating that there will be 292 to 363 more by the end of the year.
“This really has become a more and more critical event for New England, and really for the entire country,” said Special Agent Jon DeLena, with the New England branch of the DEA. “This is about people paying attention to this crisis and stepping up to do something about it.”
In addition to prescription drugs, vaping devices and cartridges were also being accepted for disposal for the first time ever, after more than 1,600 people — many of them teens and adults — have been sickened in a national vaping illness outbreak that appears to have started in March. At least 34 have died.