What should I do with my unused meds? The city has an answer that helps the environment and keeps pills off the street.
San Francisco has collected and destroyed 140,000 pounds of unused pills and other medications — equivalent to the weight of 10 cable cars — as part of a program urging residents to discard unused drugs so they don’t contaminate landfills and water sources, or fall into the wrong hands, city officials said Tuesday.
The drugs were collected from 2017 to 2022 under the Safe Medicine Disposal Program, which was created by a 2015 ordinance spearheaded by then-Supervisor London Breed.
The program is ongoing and includes 62 locations in San Francisco where people can drop off unused and expired prescription or over-the-counter pills, liquid medications, ointments and creams at kiosks, including at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital’s outpatient pharmacy, Kaiser Permanente, police stations and many CVS and Walgreens locations. People can also request envelopes to be mailed to their homes that they can use to mail back unused drugs.
San Francisco isn’t the only jurisdiction that has such a program — Alameda and Santa Clara counties do as well — and it’s an issue many cities are grappling with, said Tyrone Jue, director of the Environmental Department, which oversees the San Francisco program.
Many people flush unused pills down the toilet. Because wastewater treatment plants cannot remove all traces of pharmaceuticals, chemicals in antibiotics and other drugs can get into rivers and streams and contaminate drinking water or accumulate in fish and other wildlife later consumed by people. Drugs dumped in landfills can also wind up in groundwater, Jue said.
The unused medications collected through the program get incinerated. The efforts are paid for by the pharmaceutical industry and implemented by two vendors selected by the city, MED-Project and Inmar, Jue said.
A map of drop-off locations is available, as is information about requesting a mail-back envelope.
Read More at the San Francisco Chronicle.
