To Recycle Medications.... or not?

An interesting problem has recently been brought to my attention involving prescription medication. You may be thinking this has something to do with obtaining prescription medications illegally or selling them off to make a profit. But it doesn’t… It is about what you do after your medications have expired.

For many years people would just flush them down the toilet, out of sight out of mind right? Wrong. The plants that process the water don’t have the means to get the chemicals from the medications out of the water. Which means that all the chemicals from your old narcotics, birth control pills, and mood enhancers are now floating freely in the oceans, streams, rivers, and even in your drinking water. Guess what that means? That someone sitting right next to you could be drinking water that contains trace amounts of hormones, opium, or any number of chemicals found in drugs. And while they aren’t going to hit with a full effect like they actually took the pill it is still going to have an effect on them, it is still something that is dangerous for them to be doing. But it’s not just people that this affects, all manner of marine life will be getting it from the oceans, and all the sweet woodland animals will be getting the contents from drinking the water from the streams and rivers.

This is a problem that has already been brought to attention so it has been requested that people recycle their old medications. And it seems that most people are happy to do this, it’s better for life on this planet and it doesn’t take much effort to do. So it should be simple right? It should be but it isn’t and this is where the new problem comes in. Picture this; you go into your local Rite Aid or CVS and go the pharmacy department. They sell the drugs there so it shouldn’t be a problem from them to recycle the same pills. But the person behind the counter shakes their head and tells you that “we don’t have the means to do that here.” Okay… wait…what? You tell me that we can’t flush them anymore so I try to do the right thing and you say you can’t recycle them. Now we have a problem.

You can sell the drugs all you want, you can make a profit off them, and enjoy your day behind the counter but when I try to do a simple task, the same one you asked me to do by the way, you all of a sudden can’t help me. Is it just me or does that not make sense to anyone else? You can’t tell people to do something and then not give the means to do it. Because guess what? You put a big road block in the way and people are going to turn right around and do it the old fashioned way. The same way that you’re trying to put an end to, seems rather contradictory doesn’t it?

Granted if it was just one chain that “couldn’t” recycle the drugs it might not be a problem. But that’s at least two large chains… so far that can’t do it. When CVS used to be Longs Drug Store, which was a much better outfit over all, they could recycle the drugs for you. You would go into Longs, head over to the pharmacy department, give them the bag of old prescriptions and they would simply take care of it. CVS is supposed to be a new big improved outfit so why are they taking away all the things that made Longs good? I don’t have a degree in business but that seems like a step in the wrong direction.

To be hones the whole situation just baffles me. We are told flushing the prescriptions is bad and how to fix the problem. We try to fix the problem but the companies we are supposed to go to “can’t” help. So people are going to get frustrated, give up and go back to the old fashioned way. Is that what these big companies want? To essentially go against the very thing they are supposed to be supporting, all the while giving themselves a bad name? That’s the way it seems to me.

People are willing to do the work to fix the problems of this world, not just the problem of drugs in the water, but it’s the companies that prevent us from doing that. It’s very clear that something has to change and it’s up to the people to do that. We have to let these big companies know what is going on, what they problem and what they need to do to fix it. One person saying this isn’t going to do much, but a big group of people causing a disturbance should shove the companies in the right direction.