Your journey with Ataxia will likely come with a lot of different medicines that are prescribed to you along the way. In variably one or more of these medications will not work, will no longer work, will need a different quantity, size or compound, and you will be left literally holding a fistful of frustration.
Back in the bad old days, we would just toss the bottle of meds in our wastebasket or the loo and wander on about our day, sure that we had done all that needed to be done. Maybe we’d scratch off the recipient’s name on the bottle or tube, but usually we’d just toss it. Or perhaps we’d drop the medicines into the toilet and flush them, again thinking we’d done our civic duty in disposing of our meds.
However, times they have changed and that means that the way we dispose of our medicines safely has changed, too. You can no longer safely dispose of your medicine bottles into the waste basket or flush your medicines down the toilet or the sink. Here’s why:
Whether you are a lucky rural dweller with well water or an urban dweller with treated city water, you run the risk of contaminating the very water you drink if you choose to flush or wash your medicines down the toilet or sink. Many medicines do not break down in the treatment process and they proceed to revisit you in that sparkling glass of water you just drew from your tap. Even if you have a well, disposing of your old medicines through your toilet or sink simply flushes those nonbiodegradeable medicines into your septic tank….where they hang out cozily till they decide to leach into your well. Yum!
And what about liquids, lotions, and creams? Those, too, should not simply be discarded in their tube or jar. Even if the container is supposedly air-tight, the odds are good that the container may break, shatter, puncture or otherwise release the contents…which then make their way into the water table and contaminate the water around the disposal site.
Even if you aren’t worried about your health, your discarded medicines dumped into the environment have an impact on the flora and fauna around the disposal site. In general, pharmacology companies are not required to study the impact of their medicines when improperly discarded into the environment. They have no idea exactly what their sleeping pill, pain pill, antidepressant, etc is doing in the environment. That means: neither do you.
Disposing of your old, discontinued, expired, or extraneous medicines is easy to do, particularly in the Lansing area.
First, prepare your medicines for disposal: For pills and tablets, remove all labels and markings from the container. If you need to scratch out your name, Sharpy pens are very good for this purpose. Just make sure you completely deface your name and any identifying information such as your address, the medication name, and the prescription number. Then, shake the contents of the pill container into a plain zip lock baggie. You can put as many kinds in there as you want, including the pill/s you accidentally dropped on the floor (yuck!), the expired aspirin or supplements, and so on. No one else is ever going to use these pills, so don’t worry about keeping them separate.
Once you have removed the contents of the containers and eradicated any identifying information on the container, you can pop the lid back on and toss the container into recycling or the trash. But! there’s residue on the inside of the container! Yes, there is. However! there’s not enough medicine in the dust that falls off the pills to worry too much about. And as an Ataxia person you likely have bigger fish to fry.
Now you have a little (or big) baggie of various colored pills and tablets. All you need to do now is carry the baggie to your local law enforcement office and wave it at them. They will stand up, tell you to poke it through the reception speaker hole, and carry it away and drop it into something that looks like a locked Sharp’s container. The contents of that container is dropped into an incinerator and the old meds are burned up, leaving nothing but inert ash. This is much better than dumping them into your water supply!
Some people may worry about being questioned or hassled when they try to shove a bunch of pills at a cop, but honestly in all my time of disposing of old meds, no one has ever even asked my name. I personally use the local sheriff’s office during usual business hours. Use some care to make sure you are safe while you are dropping your baggie off. In other words, if you happen to live in a rough neighborhood, don’t advertise your ‘wares’, put your pill baggie in a small paper bag and let the officer open and dispose of it. Just tell them you are dropping off old medicines.
You can also return your tablets or pills to the Walgreen’s Pharmacy on Jolly Road in Lansing. The pharmacy there is open 24 hours and you can drop in and drop them off. I prefer to use our local sheriff’s office to dispose of pills because, well, “police!”
Now, about creams, lotions and liquids. The police will NOT accept these forms of medication. Sparrow Hospital Pharmacy used to accept pills/tablet/liquid/lotion/cream and paste medicines, but no longer do. That leaves the MSU Pharmacy, located at 804 Service Road and the 24-hour Walgreen’s Pharmacy at Jolly Road. If you are an Ataxia patient seeing any of the many fine neurologists at MSU Neurology, then you already know where the MSU Pharmacy address is located. The Pharmacy is at the front of the building and if you are using an assistive device you may want to get a friend or caregiver to drop off for you.
Liquid/lotion/cream/paste medicines should be kept in their original packaging with the patient’s name, the prescribing doctor, prescription number, and so on still intact. MSU Pharmacy will NOT accept medications unless all this information is still there. You can also turn your old tablets in to them, but you need to make sure all the information is intact on the bottle. Personally, I find popping into the cop shop a bit simpler than trotting over to the MSU campus and dealing with parking and so on.
At this time, MSU Pharmacy and the Jolly Road Walgreen’s are the only organizations in the local Lansing area (that I currently know of) that accept liquid/lotion/cream or paste medicines for disposal.
So there you have it. If you want to safely dispose of medications for whatever reason, this is how. Please do not throw your medicines away in your trash or flush them. It’s an avoidable environmental hazard that could come back to revisit you in unforeseen ways.
Please note that the locations mentioned here are Lansing-area specific. Your mileage may vary in other locations and states. Just call your local police station and ask. Do NOT dial 911 as this is not an emergency; please call their land line.
And by the way, you can dispose of pain killers of any stripe (aspirin, tylenol, oxy, whatever) in this manner. The recipients in this case do not care what is in your pill disposal baggie or bottle!
Lansing Area Group 