Medication Cleanout Project Wins Award from VDH

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Medications can help you recover from an illness, but unused, expired medications — if taken in the wrong way — could kill you, or someone you love.

This was the message that organizers of the Medication Cleanout Event, the first of its kind in the Greater Richmond Area, hoped to convey through its one-day medicine collection project in April.

“A simple action like cleaning out the home medicine cabinet can prevent these problems,” said Evelyn Waring, education coordinator for the Virginia Poison Center at the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center.

Because of the message and its impact, the project, which was a collaboration of the Virginia Poison Center and Chesterfield Substance Abuse Free Environment Inc., was awarded a 2010 Innovative Injury Prevention Projects award by the Virginia Department of Health. Organizers accepted the award at the VDH’s 2010 Injury Prevention Symposium on July 22 in Richmond.

“We’ve already been contacted by several organizations who are interested in replicating this project,” said Waring. “It’s exciting that our event may be used as a template to help implement this important strategy throughout the state. Reducing the incidence of poisoning should be a priority in every community.”

Waring said that poisoning deaths have become an increasing problem in Virginia. Recent statistics released by the VDH showed that poisoning deaths were second only to motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of injury deaths in 2008.

“According to the report, poisoning was also the second leading cause of injury hospitalizations,” said Waring. “Medications — prescription, over-the-counter and illicit — are responsible for the vast majority of fatal poisonings.”

The Medication Cleanout project gave residents in the greater Richmond area an opportunity to safely and legally dispose of prescription medication while also being environmentally sound.

“Improper disposal of medications is contaminating our nation’s water supplies with unknown and potentially negative effects on both the aquatic ecosystems and on human health,” said Waring. “And the accumulation of unneeded or outdated medications in households dramatically increases the potential for medication mistakes, accidental poisoning and deliberate abuse of prescription narcotics.”

Danny Jaek, one of 20 VCU School of Pharmacy students who volunteered at the event, said he gained many positive experiences through the project.

“It gave us the opportunity to learn about how medications can impact the environment when not properly disposed,” he said. “I was very impressed by the sheer volume of medicine we had collected in one day. It felt good to know we were keeping these drugs from going back into our rivers and streams as well as out of the hands of people who could potentially use them inappropriately.”

According to the Chesterfield Police, which monitored the collection of the drugs, the street value from the day’s collection was in the “tens of thousands” of dollars.

Over the course of the day, Waring said that there were several individual stories that touched the heart. One elderly woman handed over a bag of prescriptions, saying that they had belonged to a husband who had died in 1987. The woman, with tears in her eyes, said that it was such a relief to be able to finally get rid of them.

“Events like these are here to benefit the entire community,” Jaek said. “It’s important that we continue having these events in order to keep reaching out to folks who don’t know the proper way to dispose of old medication.”