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By JOHN RICHARDSON
Blethen Maine Newspapers Saturday, June 16, 2007

She'd been hanging onto the old meds for years, and it felt good, she said, to finally get rid of them without doing damage to the environment.

"Ten or 15 years ago, I was just flushing this stuff down the toilet," she said. "It just never occurred to me it was bad."

Dulik, and a lot of other mid-coast residents, are now well aware that wildlife can suffer when flushed pharmaceuticals reach streams and rivers. And there is growing concern among police here that stockpiles of old medications such as prescription pain pills are increasingly being targeted by burglars or stolen by relatives with drug habits.

On Friday, mid-coast residents brought hundreds of pounds of medications -- from narcotics and anti-depressants to antibacterial ointments and cough syrup -- to the fourth collection event here in the past two years.

"It's getting bigger every time," said Peter Lamarre of the Sagadahoc County Sheriff's Department. Lamarre was one of several law enforcement officials at the collection sites to make sure the drugs go where they are supposed to: incinerators designed to handle medical wastes.

The midcoast collections, a collaboration between Mid Coast Hospital and number of advocacy groups and police agencies, are the first of their kind in Maine. But all Mainers may soon be able to clean out their medicine cabinets without flushing old drugs or putting them out with the trash.

"This is coming," said Ann Pistell of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.

The Maine Legislature has already authorized a statewide program for residents to mail in their old medications for proper disposal.

But the program has yet to be set up or financed.

Now the University of Maine Center on Aging has received a $150,000 federal grant to set up a pilot medication collection system in different parts of the state. The effort could lead to a statewide program and a national model.

Details are now being worked out, but the general plan is for residents to take unused prescription and over-the-counter medications to designated pharmacies that will be equipped to mail the products away for disposal.

A mail-in system will be less labor intensive than the kind of collection that took place Friday, said Marla Davis, a nurse who helped coordinate the effort. It also will be much more convenient and accessible, she said.

With efforts under way to expand a collection system beyond the mid-coast, Pistell of the DEP is advising residents to hold onto old pharmaceuticals and keep them secure so they're not stolen or accidentally misused.

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the American Pharmacists Association, meanwhile, are encouraging people to smash pills, seal them in a plastic bag with cat litter or old coffee grounds and throw them into the trash.

There is widespread agreement now that the time-honored practice of flushing the medications down drains or toilets is the worst disposal option. That's because the ingredients in the drugs go all the way through sewage treatment plants into streams and rivers.

In some parts of the country, researchers have linked flushed medications to such effects as feminized male fish, meaning that they turn into reproductive females and lay eggs. No such impacts have been reported in Maine, though tests have uncovered traces of a variety of medications in the state's waterways.

"We don't need trout with three eyes," said Lamarre.

Sagadahoc County Sheriff Mark Westrum said that after participating in the midcoast collections and learning more about the environmental impacts, he hopes to get the state's county jails to stop flushing unused medications.

But police officials and advocates for the elderly also say the collections make sense as a way to improve safety and reduce crime.

"It's not good stuff to have around the house," said Patty Kimball, of Volunteers of America, which helped set up Friday's collection and is working to reduce elder abuse.

Police said there have been cases of family members stealing medications from the elderly. And, they said, drug users also have targeted the medicine cabinets of people they know are sick or have just died.

The fire station was one of four places where the medications could be dropped off Friday. After a couple of hours, workers here had more than two large trash bags filled with pill bottles and other items.

Audrey Tinkham of West Bath contributed a shopping bag full of old pharmaceuticals to the fire station. She said she simply didn't want them finding their way into the environment.

"I was born and brought up on a farm, and we had to be pretty careful abut how things were disposed of," Tinkham said.

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