This shop has been compensated by Inmar Intelligence and its advertiser. All opinions are mine alone.

Happy Spring! Who here has been doing some spring cleaning before spring even began? As someone living in Boston, you know winters can get long, so as a way to cope, I started my spring cleaning early and currently already have two bags full of clothes I’d like to donate.

Now, I know spring cleaning usually means purging your closets, but what about other areas of your homes? Do you ever take inventory of your drawers, reorganize the pantry, and look at your medicine cabinets?

Yes, medicine cabinets.

When was the last time you did an inventory of all of your unused/expired medications?

I just assessed my cabinet and I was shocked to find unused medications that have expired years ago (including from my fibroid surgery in 2020).

While it is important to freshen up the usual routines like getting rid of old clothes or changing up your workout routine to celebrate longer days, it is crucial we go beyond the traditional cleaning and add our medicine cabinets to our list and see how we can get rid of drugs safely.

Did you know prescription drugs not properly discarded in the trash can be used for illegal sales or abuse while potentially contaminating the water supply? As a public health professional, the drug overdose epidemic in the United States, let alone in Massachusetts, is staggering and we all have a role to play even if we aren’t directly working the front-lines. Education on proper disposal needs to be normalized or unused prescription drugs would find their way into the wrong hands.

Whether you’re living alone or living with others, we all have accumulated prescriptions throughout the years. As you conduct your spring cleaning inventory, you may come across some expired or unused medications. While it is our instinct to dump the bottle in the trash, flush it down the toilet, or just leave the bottle unattended in our cabinet because it is easier than trying to get rid of it safely, this imposes a great risk for someone to accidentally take prescription meds not in their name — usually not knowing the risks. While unused medications may appear harmless, we may be contributing to someone else’s harm without intent.

April 22nd 2023 is National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day, and we all have a role to play to ensure the next person does not fall victim to accidentally taking someone else’s drug without realizing potential harm. Additionally, disparities continue to be prevalent particularly amongst communities of color. Prescription medication use also varies amongst various households highlighting health inequities even more.

Introducing Inmar Intelligence’s Consumer Drug Take-back™

In an effort to assist in reducing these issues and bringing awareness to the massive opioid crisis that is plaguing many families, The Safe Medication Disposal Program in Massachusetts created a Consumer Drug Take-Back program that provides consumers with a safe option to discard their unused or outdated prescription medications in secure kiosks located across the US.

Yay for efficiency and easiness!

The Safe Medication Disposal Program in Massachusetts has a tool to help you safely dispose of unused or expired medications. Simply enter your zip code and we will provide a list of safe drug take-back kiosks in your area. Thank you for helping to protect your family and our communities.

This program ensures compliance with drug take-back regulation, which essentially takes the guesswork out of us. This also strengthens partnerships between communities and pharmacies by working together for collective impact. To get started, I used the online locator to help me find a location closest to me (~10 mins away!). If you are unable to locate a kiosk near you, they also have a mail back service for more accessibility depending on the area you are in.

Drug take-back is important to me because as a public health professional and a wellness content creator, prescription medicines are often left out in conversations. Wellness encompasses more than having an aesthetically pleasing morning routine and should be extended to reflect overall community health.</p><p>It is important that we, alongside future generations, continue to keep these conversations at the forefront to protect ourselves and the people around us who may be impacted through our unintentional actions.

With the rise of drug take-back programs and mail-back services, we have the power to educate people around us to properly dispose of these medications to not only think about the environment but to potentially save lives. Not everyone is equipped with the privilege to learn about prescription drugs and how it can affect them, so my hope is that this blog post encourages you to add medicine cabinets to your spring cleaning list and make it a part of your household routine.

By us taking that extra initiative, we can collectively reduce the statistics — one kiosk at a time.