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Drug Take-Back Event Set for Saturday

Michael Chen, flickr Creative Commons

Law enforcement officers in Kansas and across the country will be collecting unused, expired and leftover medications on Saturday.

It’s an initiative called the National Drug Take-Back Day.

The drug collection events are a way to safely dispose of leftover and expired medications to prevent accidental or intentional misuse.

Studies show a majority of abused prescription drugs are obtained from family and friends, including from the home medicine cabinet.

Attorney General Derek Schmidt said in a news release that unused medications are dangerous for kids, pets and the environment.

“Getting these leftover medicines out of the medicine cabinets and safely destroyed keeps them from falling into the wrong hands and makes our communities safer, ” Schmidt said.

The Sedgwick County sheriff’s office collected and destroyed more than 1100 pounds of unwanted medications during a similar drug take-back day in October.

The Kansas attorney general’s office says more than 50 tons of unwanted medications have been collected and destroyed in Kansas alone since the program began in 2010.

At least seven locations around Sedgwick County will be available Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. for people to drop-off their unused prescription or over-the-counter medicines.

The sites include the Sedgwick County Zoo, Oaklawn Activity Center, Household Hazardous Waste center and police departments in Maize, Derby, Haysville and Bel Aire.

To find a drug drop-off site outside of Sedgwick County, visit www.ag.ks.gov.

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Follow Deborah Shaar on Twitter @deborahshaar

 

To contact KMUW News or to send in a news tip, reach us at news@kmuw.org.

 
 

Deborah joined the news team at KMUW in September 2014 as a news reporter. She spent more than a dozen years working in news at both public and commercial radio and television stations in Ohio, West Virginia and Detroit, Michigan. Before relocating to Wichita in 2013, Deborah taught news and broadcasting classes at Tarrant County College in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas area.