Getting pain pills off the street

A drug take-back event sponsored by the Bellmore-Merrick Community Parent Center, the Central High School District and the Heroin Task Force on Sept. 27 yielded more than 200 pounds of medications, representing hundreds, if not thousands, of the opioid prescription pain pills that a growing number of teenagers are abusing, according to Wendy Tepfer, the Parent Center’s executive director.

Many young people swipe narcotic pain analgesics from their parents’ and grandparents’ medicine cabinets to get high. According to the most recent Monitoring the Future study — the nation’s largest survey of drug use among young people, taken by the Office of National Drug Control Policy — prescription medication is the second-most-abused category of drugs, after marijuana. Meanwhile, the latest National Survey on Drug Use and Health states that 70 percent of people who abuse prescription pain relievers get them from friends or relatives, while just 5 percent buy them from drug dealers or over the Internet.

Drug abusers who pop pain pills often graduate to heroin, another opioid, which sells for as little as $5 a bag on the street, according to addiction experts.

The idea behind drug take-back events is to get prescription painkillers and other potentially harmful drugs out of people’s medicine cabinets and off the street. Police collect the drugs and burn them.

The Bellmore-Merrick event was part of National Drug Take-back Day, sponsored twice a year by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration’s Office of Diversion Control. Drug take-back days allow anyone to drop off prescription medications to police officers –– no questions ask.

Tepfer said she was thrilled with the turnout at Bellmore-Merrick’s first-ever take-back event. “It exceeded my expectations,” she said. “We got good participation from a cross-section of the community. It was a diverse audience that attended.”