POVERTY: Prince George part of provincial pilot project A4 Wednesday, April 18, 2012 John Furlong and a Rising Star in local medicine talk about sports and health A3
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Prescription drugs found in dumpster ■ disposal questions raised
Delynda pilon
newsroom@pgfreepress.com
Packages and bottles of unopened prescription drugs don’t belong in a city dumpster, but that is exactly where a resident found buckets of them. A local mom who’s down on her luck got a surprise when she went dumpster diving Easter weekend in one of the bins behind the clinic at Spruceland Mall. ‘Marsha’ (not her real name as she would prefer to avoid embarrassing any of her kids) is having a tough go of it. A single mom of three, a reformed drug addict with a record, she is having problems with the system and making the dollars stretch far enough to feed all of her children. Bottles, scrap metal, copper wire – all of these items can be sold. So sometimes, in the darkest part of the night, she pulls on jeans and a jacket and takes her beat-up old car to the city’s dumpsters, going through the trash of others as she tries to earn enough money for groceries. She almost walked past that particular dumpster on that particular night. From experience she knew it usually held little of value anyway. But you just never know, right? She was shocked when she knocked away a cardboard box and saw the garbage bin was stocked with pharmaceuticals. “It was full of them,” she said. “There was everything from those old blood pressure cuffs that are full of mercury to barbiturates.” Marsha was torn about what to do. As a former drug addict, one look at the ‘treasure trove’ told her she’d be able to clear about three grand on the haul, and
whoever took it off her hands would likely earn $10,000 by the time the goods hit the street. But she has changed her life and doesn’t want to live that way anymore. So should she walk away? Leave it there for someone else to grab and abuse? Maybe someone too young, someone who didn’t understand some of that stuff was dangerous? She packed it up and took it to her mom’s carport. Then, more curious than anything, she began to sort. She filled tubs, recyclable shopping bags and a two and a half gallon pail then loaded them on the back of a trailer. There was diabetic medication, needles for insulin and many bottles, vials, pills and inhalers filled with medications like Adavair (asthma and COPD inhaler), Mavik (high blood pressure medication), Lipitor (for lowering cholesterol), Dovobet (for psoriasis), Rasilez (reduce blood pressure), Aldactazide (reduce blood pressure), Relpax (treats migraines), Cipralex (treats depression) and a cloth bag full of loose pills all the colours of the rainbow, some with letters, some looking like vitamins, but none with a clear purpose. Some of the medications she found included ingredients she knew, thanks to her past, were an important component for making crystal methamphetamine. As with most medications, many of those she found can cause minor to serious and even fatal side affects in some people. She said she really wasn’t tempted to sell the medications, however she was stymied over how to get rid of it and shocked they were disposed of in such a haphazard way.
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Brent Liston, a pharmacist at Reid’s Prescriptions, said they, along with most other pharmacies, belong to a program that helps them dispose of medications in an e n v i ro n m e n t a l l y sound way. The drugs are dumped into blue buckets, and when they’re full the company in charge of the program picks them up and ships them to Vancouver to be incinerated. “Prescriptions can’t be re-used,” Liston said, explaining the law doesn’t allow that to happen. “But they need to be destroyed in an environmentally sensitive way.” Liston added that even if they didn’t belong to the program, ethically medications should not be disposed of in that manner. When it comes to the samples some medical clinics get, Liston said they go back to the manuDe Ly nd a PILON/ Fre e Pre s s facturer. A local woman was shocked to find buckets, bags and bins of drugs disA representative posed of in a dumpster behind the south end of Spruceland Mall. from a local clinic explained to Marsha they were trash. said they return out-of-date medMarsha was encouraged by the donated by the family of a doctor ications to the drug rep, however B.C. Civil Liberties Association who recently passed away when she could not speak about the to tell the RCMP about her find. they cleared out his office. The protocols in other clinics. They, in turn, spoke with the clinic couldn’t use the medicaShe was unsure about any clinic, a privately owned facility, tion, so apparently disposed of legalities surrounding the issue, at Spruceland Mall. it by tossing it into a city bin. A but she said the drugs certainly Someone from the clinic spokesperson for the clinic could should not be thrown into the picked up the medications and not be reached at press time.
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