BROOKINGS – The National Prescription Drug Take Back Day on Saturday, Oct. 27, was a success, according to Brookings County Sheriff Marty Stanwick, with more than 160 pounds of unused medication collected.
This is the first time the Brookings County Sheriff’s Office has participated in this event, which is held twice a year and aims to get expired or unused prescription drugs out of homes to prevent their theft and abuse.
The collected 160 pounds of drugs have been put into six boxes that soon will be shipped off to the United States Drug Enforcement Administration offices in Omaha, Nebraska, to be incinerated. Stanwick saw people dropping off their unused drugs last Saturday, and he was surprised how old some of the drugs were.
“It’s amazing how many people come in and say we’ve had this for four, five years or whatever. They get a new prescription, but they don’t get rid of the old one and it’s just been in their medicine cabinet for four or five years,” he said.
The next Drug Take Back Day will be in April, but Stanwick encouraged people to continue to bring their unused drugs to the Sheriff’s Office, as they will continue to collect them. There is a drop-off box in the east lobby of the facility. The only thing that they cannot accept are needles, which require special containers.
Crime related to prescription drugs isn’t unheard of in Brookings County; in fact, it is something Stanwick sees more of lately, with more reports of stolen prescription drugs reaching his office.
“We had an incident in Volga last summer where we had door-to-door salespeople, and one residence reported this. They asked to use the restroom right away and after these door-to-door salespeople had left, the residents found that some of their OxyContin was missing from their medicine cabinet,” Stanwick said.
They see a lot of cases where a visitor goes to the host’s bathroom and searches their medicine cabinet for drugs to steal.
“If someone is hooked on or addicted to opioids, they’re out drug searching,” Stanwick said, adding that sometimes it is friends or family members.
Oftentimes, it’s not that an entire bottle is being stolen but just some of the pills inside, so it isn’t immediately noticed.
“We just don’t want the temptation there,” Stanwick said. “Somebody knows somebody who has gone to the dentist or just had surgery or something like that. Drug seekers will seek that out knowing that they’ve probably got some type of pain medicine for that. When they can’t do that anymore, that’s when they get into the illegal stuff, the methamphetamines and such.”
Contact Eric Sandbulte at esandbulte@brookingsregister.com.
