RUMFORD — From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 29, local police will set up at the police station to receive unused, unwanted or expired prescription drugs for safe disposal.
Rumford police are partnering with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in this nationwide initiative to properly dispose of unwanted prescriptions to reduce the risk of accidental overdose by small children or others who mistake them for other medications, Chief Stacy Carter said Wednesday in a news release.
“We will ask no questions about what you bring for disposal,” he said.
“If you want to protect your privacy, you can empty your bottles (except for liquids) into the bin and take the bottles home with you, or you can black out with a marker your personal information on the bottles. We will not be looking at or gathering any personal information.”
Recent studies by the Environmental Protection Agency and others detected pharmaceutical drugs in varying concentrations in our nation’s water supplies.
“Therefore, they should not be flushed down the toilet,” Carter said.
“Only drugs that are so potentially dangerous to people rather than the environment should be flushed. Such drugs will say on their labels if they are flushable.”
A drug can be helpful to someone with a particular sickness but harmful to others. One drug may interact with another that someone is taking in a way that can seriously harm or kill them, he said.
“It is also illegal to give a controlled substance to someone else,” Carter said. “However, it is legal for you to give your unwanted medications to law enforcement.”
The DEA is particularly interested in medications containing controlled substances, but Carter said police will accept any medicines brought for disposal. Needles will not be accepted, however.
People unable to bring their prescriptions to turn in between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Sept. 29 can still drop them off from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekdays at the Rumford Police Department by putting them into the drug take-back container set up just outside the police dispatch window.
The medication will be turned over to DEA to be incinerated according to federal and state environmental guidelines. For more information visit DEA.gov.
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