We were thinking about our medicine cabinet last night. It's relatively clean, but we decided to rifle through and do a little purge, regardless. We don't have much prescription medicine, but we did find a few tubes and over the counter bottles of expired drugs (of the cold medicine variety).
So -- what to do with them?
Treat your drugs, prescription and otherwise like hazardous waste.
The best places to go when looking to responsibly dispose of expired medicine is your pharmacy. Many pharmacies have takeback programs. If your pharmacy doesn't, call around.
If you can't find a pharmacy that will correctly dispose of your medicine, then call your city's hazardous waste department. Hopefully, they can help.
In our neighborhood -- Berkeley, California -- Elephant Pharmacy will take back medicine for safe disposal.
If you know of a pharmacy that does the same in your neighborhood, please list it below -- for the benefit of your neighbors!
image via Merrick Brown; flickr.com
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I recently did the same purge, and came up with 5 bottles of hydrogen pyroxide (?!) What to do with those?
If you're in Palo Alto, Palo Alto Medical Foundation (the medical center on El Camino near University)'s pharmacy accepts unwanted/expired meds. Here's the February announcement:
http://www.pamf.org/news/2008/0201unwantedorexpired.html
Pharmacy hours are
Monday through Friday, 9-6:30
Saturday, 9-1
And the map:
http://www.pamf.org/maps/paloalto.html
I hope that everyone else is able to properly dispose of their prescriptions meds. Unfortunately none of the pharmacies in my area offer a take back program. One told me to dispose of the meds in the plastic bottle to prevent contamination of the water supply but it's not like disposing of plastic bottles into a landfill is a great solution either!
wow. i'm glad you addressed this! My medicine cabinet is fairly clean & lean, but that's because i did a purge about a year ago and (gulp) threw everything in the trash. Yikes.
re: hydrogen peroxide, assume you mean standard drugstore 1%-3% solution
leave the caps off the bottles. it will "decompose" to water (the extra oxygen having released into the air). you can gargle with it as is, so it shouldn't harm anything to just pour it out.
Law enforcement recommend disposing of your meds by mixing them in with your pets litter or other droppings to avoid others finding your drugs and selling them illegally.
hydrogen peroxide, if it has not decomposed as stated above, is an excellend cleaner for the bathroom. it zaps mildew/mold. best used with a brush type implement.
Almost a year after this article was posted, I needed to find out how to safely dispose of my expired prescriptions. So of course I did a search on Re-Nest which didn't yield the results I was hoping for, but did provide a few tips for further searches. For the sake of posterity I'll include my results and throw out the recommendation of checking http://www.nodrugsdownthedrain.org/. I just input my zip code in the L.A. area and found a few places that will take back my expired drugs.