National Prescription Drug Take Back Day: Everything You Should Know

October is perhaps most famously known for being Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but it’s also an important month for medication, too. In fact, two major medication-related events happen in October. The first event takes place on October 21st. Known as National Check Your Meds Day, the event takes place every year on October 21st; the second event is National Prescription Drug Take Back Day on October 26th—a semi-annual event sponsored by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The second National Prescription Drug Take Back Day happens in April.

National Check Your Meds Day is a day where you can bring your medications to your pharmacy for a review by a pharmacist or maybe even a pharmacy school student. Participating pharmacies will review all your medications, dietary supplements (vitamins, herbs, nutritional products, etc.), and over-the-counter drugs. The program aims to improve medication use by eliminating unnecessary drugs such as duplicated drugs, preventing drug interactions, and making sure the medications you are taking are the best ones for your individual situation and health needs. You can read more about that program here.

The National Prescription Drug Take Back Day on October 26th gives folks a chance to dispose of their prescription uncontrolled and controlled substances in a safe and legal way.

Before you toss your old medications in the trash, here are a few reasons to ensure you dispose of these medications safely:

1. Your medications could end up contaminating your water supply and the soil. Prescriptions drugs such as antidepressants, opioids, and blood pressure medications along with chemicals from sunscreens (many of which the FDA also considers to be drugs) and perfumes have been found in detectable levels in drinking water.
2. Finding better ways to get rid of your prescription medications can help prevent misuse and abuse of prescription drugs. It’s important to take prescription medications such as opioid painkillers, certain muscle relaxants, and other controlled substances to a pharmacy for safe disposal. Unfortunately, opioid abuse is an epidemic in the United States. Each day, more than 130 people in the US die as a result of overdosing on opioid medications.

Some pharmacies offer services to help people dispose of unused or unwanted prescription medications. The pharmacies may have special receptacles where they store discarded medications to be picked up later and carefully destroyed by companies that provide medication disposal services. Please note that it’s probably a good idea to call the pharmacy ahead of bringing your medications in. Not all pharmacies offer this service, nor are they required to do so.

And, as you may have already suspected, things can get a little hairy when trying to dispose of controlled substances. It is illegal to return unwanted controlled substances to a pharmacy for disposal if that particular pharmacy is not authorized by the DEA to accepted discarded controlled substances. Also, by law, pharmacies are not able to accept illegal drugs or schedule I controlled substances, such as heroin or hallucinogens.

Since Medication Take Back Days only occur twice a year, you have to find a way to safely manage and dispose of your medications the remaining 363 days of the year.

Here are a few quick tips:

1. First, please don’t flush your medications down the toilet. While this was considered the right thing to do back in the day, we now know it’s not the safest thing for our environment, animals, or humans. That’s because, despite all our incredible technology and scientific developments, neither our water treatment facilities nor fancy water filtration systems can successfully filter out all environmental pollutants, many of which include pharmaceuticals Over the years, pharmaceutical contamination has become more of an issue.
2.   Instead: Find out if there you have any facilities in your area that accepted unwanted prescription drugs. You can search for such facilities using the search engine on this page on the FDA website.
3. Next, if there aren’t any places in your area that allow you to accept unwanted medications, your next bet is to dispose of them yourself. Just mix up any medications that may have abuse potential with kitty litter, coffee grounds, or dirt before you put it in a sealed container such as a plastic bag, and put it in the trash.
4. Also, make sure you’ve removed any personal information from your empty medication bottles that could be used to identify you before you toss or recycle them.

Finally, even though it’s generally no longer recommended to flush your medications down the toilet, there are a few medications that are considered safe to flush down the toilet if you don’t have access to a pharmacy that accepts prescription medications that are not controlled substances or facility that is registered with the DEA to accept controlled substances. The page on the FDA’s website has a list of medications are considered safe to flush down the toilet.