Hand In Your Unused Drugs

By Author: Steven Johnson
Total Articles: 490
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We hold a number of world records. Some justify national pride - our people have outperformed everyone else and shown themselves the best. Other records are less worthy. Take, for example, the fact we spend more money per head on drugs than any other country in the world. If you want to think of pill-taking as a competitive sport, we are clear winners. How do we know this? There are two measures. The first is the figures produced by the pharmaceutical manufacturers which show them producing ever more medications and reporting ever higher profits. The second is the record of the number of prescriptions written in each year. Except, of course, the number of prescriptions only tells a part of the story. The online pharmacies dispense drugs without asking for a prescription. There's no duty on any of these international drugstores to report the volume of drugs sold. We are left to guess how much they add to the small mountain of drugs in circulation in the US. All we can say is that we are the winners in this competition without having to add in any sales made online. Why should we worry about this?

Thinking about the young ...
... - they have grown up in a country that routinely advertises drugs on television. At every point, they are reassured that the FDA has approved these drugs as safe. Why then should they believe there are going to be problems if they take a few? The majority of other countries do not allow drugs to be advertised nationally. It's only because of the internet that local populations have become aware of the names of the more popular drugs. In the rest of the world, people are more cautious about taking drugs. At the other end of the age range, we get to the Boomers who grew up in a culture where soft drugs were acceptable. As the police have slowly increased enforcement, there's been a move to accept prescription drugs as a substitute. In the middle, the children of Boomers lived in a world where their parents were often high, and they see little wrong with the experimentation of their children. So here's a second world record for you. More Americans die from abusing prescription drugs than street drugs. They are easier to obtain and cheaper than street drugs.

This brings us to the National Take Back Initiative, a program introduced by the DEA to persuade us to empty our medicine cabinets. The benzodiazepines are the most abused class of drugs in the US. Klonopin is one of the benzodiazepines and we should hand in any unused quantities to ensure no one in our families or among our friends has easy access. Of course, you could flush them down the toilet so they would end up in our water supply. That way, we could all enjoy drinking water from the faucet. So, the DEA program is the best approach to disposal. All local police forces are running a "no questions asked" collection system. Take your unused Klonopin and any other drugs likely to be abused and drop them off safely. Let's win the world record for the safe disposal of unused drugs.