I still remember watching my great aunt's hospice nurse as she grimly flushed the Vicodin, pill by pill by pill. Watching, and trying not to grab her wrist and yank those lovely painkillers away from her. I'd thrown my back out once, you see, and I remembered this heavenly buzz...
I wasn't thinking at all about the environment.
But the mayor of Waterloo is. Tests of drinking water samples around the country are showing trace amounts of antidepressants, antibiotics, hormones, anti-seizure drugs, and painkillers. And nobody's sure how to remove the chemicals from the water, once it's contaminated. When Mayor Tom Smith traveled through Arkansas and learned about a program collecting prescription drugs, he decided his town should offer the same service. Waterloo is rather proud of its water. Rather than have it adulterated it with weird cocktails of chemicals, the city was more than willing to gather and incinerate them.
So the mayor talked to the police chief, Jim Trantham, and on July 1, they set up a drop-off box in the lobby of the police department, which was already open 24/7. ("It never made sense to me to close it," Trantham says, "because it's where people come for help.").
Waterloo's is the first permanent, 24/7, municipal program of this kind in the St. Louis region. Anyone is invited to bring any drug of any quantity, no questions asked.
I couldn't help but wonder what was in that dropbox, two months later. Anything illegal in the mix?
"Not yet," Trantham told me, grinning. "I thought maybe we'd find a bag of grass now and then. But it's been prescription drugs of all kinds, over-the-counter medicines, a lot of liquid cough syrup--even bottles of eyeglass cleaner. I'm just hoping we don't end up with a kitten in there one night!"
If they do wind up with contraband, will the donor be prosecuted? "It's no questions asked, but if you drop something illegal in there, and we can identify you... We have videocameras in the lobby, in case someone tries to break into the box. And this doesn't suspend the law. But you have just as much right to come in to the police with it and say, 'Hey, i found the stuff.'
"We're getting ready, possibly this week, to do a drop," he added. "We are up to 200 pounds of unwanted medicine. And as the mayor said this morning when I told him, that's 200 pounds that hasn't been flushed into the water system or kept on a shelf where kids could get it. A lot of teenagers think it's OK to experiment with prescription drugs, because a doctor prescribed them."
The "drop" is at an incinerator in Sauget. "I'll take it up there, sign the paperwork, weigh it again, and witness it being destroyed," Trantham says.
Safely.
