Law enforcement agencies in Maine collected 27,040 pounds of prescription drugs on April 26, setting a new collection record for the state, according to Michael Wardrop, the resident agent in charge for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in Maine.
The collection was part of a biannual nationwide program by the DEA called National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day.
According to a DEA press release, the take-back events give the public an opportunity to “prevent pill abuse and theft by ridding their homes of potentially dangerous expired, unused, and unwanted prescription drugs.”
“The collection that we had over the weekend was the largest collection we’ve had to date,” Wardrop said of the over 13.5 tons of drugs turned in in Maine. “It was also the largest state collection in New England.”
The drugs were incinerated at a waste energy facility in Haverill, Mass., on April 28, Wardrop said.
Since the initial “take-back” in the fall of 2010, Maine has led New England six out of eight times in total weight of returned drugs – Massachusetts took first place in the initial event and the one last fall, Wardrop said.
That statistic is significant because Maine has only one-fifth of the population of Massachusetts, he said.
Wardrop said he was unable to share totals from the other New England states because they had not yet been cleared for release to the public.
Maine also had the largest collection of drugs per capita in the entire country for the first seven events, Wardrop said. “I’m quite confident we’ll continue,” he said.
Wardrop said he had initially thought the high numbers of returned drugs was due to “tremendous” participation in education and awareness, but he is starting to question that theory after last weekend’s event.
“After this last effort, I’m starting to think the contrary, and I’m starting to ponder,” Wardrop said. “Is there too much over-prescribing? At some point you’d start to think we’d go down, but we’re not.”
“We obviously have an older population in the state of Maine, which would certainly drive that data set, but again, to have more medications collected than the state of Massachusetts, which has five times the population, that becomes perplexing.”
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Maine had the highest median age in the nation in 2010 at 42.7 years, but came in third with 15.9 percent of the total population age 65 or older, coming in behind West Virginia at 16 percent and Florida at 17.3 percent.
The bureau estimates the median age in Lincoln County for 2010 to 2012 at 48.7 years, which ranks it at as the 39th oldest county of close to 1900 counties in the U.S.
Lincoln County Sheriff’s Detective Robert McFetridge, who helped organize the take-back program in the county, said collection efforts around the county “did as well as they had done in the past.”
“This collection for us was right on track with what we generally collect, which is honestly kind of surprising for us, because we collect a lot of medication,” he said.
Neither McFetridge nor Wardrop were immediately able to provide specific information as to the amount of prescription drugs collected in Lincoln County at the April 26 event.
Local police departments manned collection locations in Waldoboro, Damariscotta, and Boothbay Harbor; LCSO assisted departments in Damariscotta and Boothbay Harbor, manned a site in Wiscasset, and worked with the Maine State Police at a site in Coopers Mills, McFetridge said.
The officers were assisted by volunteers from Lincoln County Triad, he said.
“A lot of medication comes in from the elderly, the prescriptions that are not completed or … sometimes people get prescribed medication and then that medication doesn’t work, so they get prescribed a different medication,” McFetridge said. “You can’t take medicine back, so they end up with this prescription that’s not taken and it ends up on the shelf.”
As part of this past weekend’s collection event, Wardrop said he worked with the University of New England College of Pharmacy to administer a 10-question voluntary survey for take-back program participants.
The anonymous survey asks questions about the age and zip code of the person the returned medication belongs to, other disposal methods the person returning the medication uses, how the medications were obtained, and why they are being returned.
The university will be using the survey as part of research on collection programs that could be applied to future programs, Wardrop said.
A call to the university contact listed on the survey was not returned by press time.
A drug collection box is available in the lobby of the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office throughout the year, McFetridge said.
