On Saturday, April 27th from 10am-2pm, locations throughout the country will participate in the National Prescription Drug Take Back Day.  This event provides an opportunity for individuals to safely dispose of expired or no longer needed prescription drugs in a safe manner.

In Bethesda, the Montgomery County Police Second District Station at 4823 Rugby Avenue is a participating location.  The Chevy Chase Village Police Department at 5906 Connecticut Avenue is also a drop-off location.

For a complete listing of locations, please visit https://takebackday.dea.gov/

Information from the National Institute on Drug Abuse:

Prescription medications, including pain relievers, can alleviate suffering and help restore quality of life for many patients. However, the misuse of prescription drugs such as opioids has become an urgent public health problem, affecting both youth and adults and contributing to marked increases in unintentional poisoning-related deaths and emergency room visits. Drug overdoses killed almost 70,000 people in the United States in 2017. About two-thirds of these deaths involved a prescription or illicit opioid. And, in 2017, more than 11 million people in the United States misused prescription pain relievers and 1.7 million had a pain reliever use disorder in the past year.

Easy access is contributing to this problem. Data shows that more than half of people who misused prescription pain relievers in the past year get them from friends and family members.

For more information about opioid misuse in particular, please visit: https://www.hhs.gov/opioids and https://www.drugabuse.gov/drugs-abuse/opioids.

To learn more about prescription drug misuse and prevention, please visit: https://www.drugabuse.gov/drugs-abuse/prescription-medicines.

To find treatment resources for prescription drug misuse and dependence, please visit: https://www.samhsa.gov/treatment/index.aspx.

We encourage you to take part in this effort to reduce the public health threat posed by prescription and OTC drug misuse in this country, and to begin by taking a look in your own medicine cabinet.