Prescription Medication Recycling Event in Richfield

On Thursday, June 2nd there will be a Medicine Collection event at the from 3-7 p.m.

According to the event page on the Hennepin County website, medications in the home have become a problem for a number of reasons:

• Unwanted, expired and unused medications in the home pose safety and health threats and can lead to abuse or poisoning.
• Prescription drug abuse is a growing problem, especially among teens. Most teenagers abusing prescription drugs get them from family and friends–and from the home medicine cabinet.
• The non-medical use of prescription drugs ranks second only to marijuana as the most common form of drug abuse in America.
• Prescriptions are only safe for the person they are prescribed for. Pharmaceutical drugs can be just as dangerous as street drugs when taken without a prescription or a doctor’s supervision.

Here is a great article from the New York Times (2007) that talks about the effects of pharmaceuticals in our water. Obviously this has been at issue for a couple years and isn’t going to stop being a problem. So if you have unused or old prescriptions in your home please don’t flush them down the toilet or let them sit around to fall into the wrong hands. Recycle them next week for free!