Excerpts from the ChicagoTribune.com:
More than a ton of prescription and over-the-counter drugs — 2,342 pounds to be exact — have been voluntarily dropped off at Naperville police and fire departments collection boxes in the past 12 months.
Drop-off containers sit outside each of Naperville’s 10 fire stations and inside the Naperville Police Department lobby. Any type of drug — from bottles of expired Tylenol to opiate painkillers available only from a doctor — can be disposed of anonymously and safely for recycling.
Not only does the effort keep such drugs out of landfills and water supplies, if they’re flushed down the toilet, they’re also not available to people who might steal them from a medicine cabinet and use some of them to get high.
Of the total amount of drugs disposed of via municipal collection sites in the last year, 545 pounds were dropped off at the police department — an increase of 83 pounds — and the rest at city fire stations.
The fire department does not monitor the type of drugs that are dropped off, but the department can say it collected 525 pounds of prescription drugs in the first three months of 2017, 399 pounds from April through June and 873 pounds of drugs from July through September.
Police have responded to 56 opioid-related overdoses so far in 2017. Five deaths were attributed to opioids in 2016 and 2017.
The Naperville Police Department launched its Narcan program in 2015, and since then has used the antidote to reverse the effects of overdose or a possible overdose 18 times in DuPage County and five in Will County.
