Metro collecting unwanted medications for disposal

By Kyle B. Hansen

Published Saturday, Feb. 20, 2010 | 1:08 p.m.

Updated Saturday, Feb. 20, 2010 | 5:43 p.m.

Metro Police have 460 pounds of drugs and other medical materials to dispose of after a collection drive on Saturday.

The drive was part of Operation Medical Cabinet, an effort by police along with the University of Southern Nevada, the Southern Nevada Water Authority and the coroner’s office to help residents safely dispose of unused prescription drugs.

People with unused or expired medications can have a hard time getting rid of them.

The old advice was to dump unused drugs down the toilet, but that is no longer recommended, said Paul Oesterman, a pharmacy professor at the University of Southern Nevada.

Medications have started to turn up in trace amounts in drinking water, so the best way to get rid of drugs is to turn them over to police, he said.

“We’re avoiding medications turning up in Lake Mead with an event like this,” he said.

The collection was held in the parking lot of the Las Vegas Sports Park. Residents could simply drive up, hand the medications anonymously to a Metro officer and drive away.

Sheriff Doug Gillespie said turning the drugs over to police is the only legal way to dispose of them, since pharmacies are no longer allowed to collect them.

“It’s not as easy to do right now, but that is part of what we are working on,” he said.

Gillespie also said it is important for people to get drugs out of their homes once they are no longer needed because they can be a target for thieves.

“We see people robbing pharmacies and not taking money, but taking a certain type of drug,” he said.

People who are addicted to medications, especially pain killers, he said, will often go to great lengths to satisfy their cravings, but the drugs are also stolen to be resold on the streets.

Drugs are increasingly being abused by teenagers who have easy access to them in their parents’ medicine cabinets, the sheriff said.

“It’s become a drug of choice and it’s easily accessible,” Gillespie said. “It’s a real problem.”

Darlene Banzhaf saw first-hand the effect of drugs on teens when she taught middle school before enrolling at the University of Southern Nevada to become a pharmacist.

She is now the president of the university’s Drug Abuse Awareness Team, which goes to middle and high schools to warn teens and their parents about the dangers of drugs, including prescription medications.

“It’s definitely something that needs to be addressed,” she said. “A lot of students, and people in general, have this misconception that just because something is a prescription or it came from a grocery store that it’s safe.”

Not a lot of people were taking advantage of the event as it began Saturday morning, but many of the people who did come dropped off grocery bags full of medications.

This is the first event of its kind in Clark County, but Gillespie said police hope to have more in the future.

In the meantime, if people need to get rid of drugs he best thing to do is to call the police department and arrange to drop them off, the sheriff said.

A Las Vegas Sun analysis of Drug Enforcement Administration records showed that Nevadans were the number one consumers per capita of hydrocodone, better known by its brand name Vicodin. Nevadans ranked fourth in per capita consumption of methadone, morphine and oxycodone.