LITTLE ROCK — Arkansas officials are getting out the message that if prescription drugs are not being used, they need to be disposed of.
Arkansas, participating in the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s National Prescription Take Back Initiative, held its third drug take-back day Saturday to gather unwanted or expired prescription drugs. In the first two take-back days, held April 30 and Sept. 25, 2010, Arkansans turned in 6.4 tons of prescription drugs, or an estimated 17 million to 19 million pills, Arkansas Drug Director Frances Flener said.
She said she has been pleased with the enthusiasm for the program shown by the state’s law enforcement agencies. She said Arkansas has had participation from more than twice the national average of law enforcement agencies and had more than twice the national average of collection sites.
There were nearly 100 collection sites around the state for Saturday’s event, but there are 29 permanent sites, mostly north of Little Rock, to accept discarded drugs 24 hours a day, year-round. Any type of unwanted prescription drug is accepted with no questions asked, according to the initiative’s website.
Permanent drug-collection sites in central Arkansas are:
Pulaski County sheriff ’s office, 2900 S. Woodrow St., Little Rock.
North Little Rock police and fire training facility, 2400 Willow St.
Little Rock Police Department, 700 W. Markham St.
Sherwood Police Department, 2201 E. Kiehl Ave.
Jacksonville Police Department, 1412 W. Main St.
Cabot Police Department, 101 N. Second St.
Benton Police Department, 114 S. East St., Suite 100.
Flener said the unprescribed use of prescription medications by young people is the fastest-growing drugabuse problem in the nation and in Arkansas. Young people are getting more drugs from friends, relatives and families than from drug dealers, she said, and often the drugs are stolen from medicine cabinets.
Teens sometimes hold “pharm parties,” at which stolen drugs are mixed together and served in punch bowls, Washington County Sheriff Tim Helder said. Partiers take certain combinations of drugs depending on the high they want, he said.
The young people don’t see the harm in taking the pills, Helder said, because they see their grandmothers taking them with no ill effects, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved them as safe.
“It’s that generation’s thing to do,” Flener said.
Flener and Helder said the parties have led to an increase in cases of overdose and sickness.
“The medicine cabinet is not a safe and secure place to store drugs long term,” Helder said.
Helder said he believes in the drug take-back program so much that he will begin dispatching patrol units to pick up unwanted prescription drugs for those who cannot take them to a collection site.
Flener and Helder said they also believe the number of overdoses has dropped since the start of the takeback program.
Fort Smith police detective Paul Smith said the 45 pounds of drugs turned in Saturday at the Fort Smith Police Department will be taken Wednesday to the Arkansas State Police troop headquarters in Fort Smith, the staging point for all the drugs collected in western Arkansas. Members of the Arkansas National Guard will pick up the drugsaccumulated there and at troop headquarters across the state and truck them to El Dorado, where the company Clean Harbors LLC will incinerate them.
Scientists suspect that prescription drugs that are flushed down toilets or dumped into landfills may be having a negative effect on the environment.
Paul Easley, environmental manager for Fort Smith, has been working with the initiative on the prescription-drug problem and said people often flush unwanted or expired prescription drugs down the toilet so they won’t get into the wrong hands to be abused or taken accidentally.
But, he said, he has found traces of prescription drugs and other chemicals in the city’s wastewater and said they could be damaging the environment. They also could lead to health problems for humans, he said.
Easley began testing Fort Smith’s wastewater after the drought of 2005 and 2006, when Fort Smith residents were forced to use the Lee Creek tailwater as part of their water supply. That water comes from the Arkansas River, which receives the city’s wastewater, and Easley said he began to wonder what might be in the new water supply.
He said he found endocrine-disrupting chemicals that can affect an organism’s hormones. His discovery was confirmed when samples of bluegill fish taken from the tailwater showed a higher ratio of females to males.
Hormones in the water can affect the sex of fish, Easley said. His office is beginning to experiment on what effects various chemicals found in prescription drugs can have on zebra fish, a type of minnow.
His findings mirrored those found by the U.S. Geological Survey in sections of the Delaware River, where it found 100 percent populations of female fish.
“You get 100 percent female, you get no reproduction, the population fails,” he said.
Easley said he’s also found concentrations of such chemicals as cocaine, methadone, oxycodone and hydrocodone in Fort Smith’s wastewater.
The government does not require the treatment of wastewater for such chemicals, he said, but he expects the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency soon to require municipalities to test their wastewater for a host of chemicals.
Treatment at wastewater treatment plants to remove those chemicals could be required in the future and it would be expensive because wastewater treatment plants have never been designed toremove those types of impurities, Easley said. The best solution, he said, would be to prevent those chemicals from getting into the water in the first place.
“Which means the drug take-back program is an integral part of that whole thing,” Easley said.
Arkansas, Pages 17 on 10/30/2011