The Tyler Police department will be part of this weekend's Drug Take Back Day, and now is the time to go through the medicine cabinet to decide what old prescriptions to drop off.   

If you've ever had surgery and not finished the prescribed pain meds, you're not alone. To be honest, those pills make my stomach hurt worse than whatever it was that I had surgery on and I usually only take one if that.  I still have three or four bottles of pain meds in the medicine cabinet, and I think one of them might be from 2003.  That medicine cabinet is not far from the living room, and it's probably the most commonly used bathroom in the house.  I have three daughters who are constantly digging around in the cabinet for bandaids, fingernail polish, cotton balls, and tweezers, and the last thing I need is for them to dig into old pills while they're in there.  This is exactly why we're supposed to pitch the pills.

Local police departments collect unused, expired, and unwanted prescription medications twice a year as part of National Drug Take Back Day, and they ship those off to the Drug Enforcement Administration to be properly disposed of.  They don't want the meds to fall into the wrong hands, and they don't want us to get rid of the drugs ourselves by flushing them because, well, sewer systems don't need pain meds and if millions of people flush pills at the same time that's a lot of hydrocodone down the drain and it could make a huge mess of the pipes.  They've thought of things that don't enter our minds on a daily basis, and they're giving us the chance to toss the meds the right way.

The DEA says that 9.7 million people misused prescription pain relievers in 2019, and the majority of those drugs came from family and friends, often from the home medicine cabinet.

This Saturday, April 24th, from 10 am to 2 pm, you'll be able to drop off unwanted meds at these locations:

TYLER PD at the UT HEALTH SCIENCE CENTER - 11937 US 271

TYLER PD at BROOKSHIRE'S - 100 Rice Road

The Tyler Police Department will be joining almost five thousand other police agencies across the country collecting drugs on Saturday, and if past events are any indication they'll gather up about a million pounds of prescription meds in four hours.

If you're in spring-cleaning mode, this is the perfect week to hit the bathroom and be part of something bigger.

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