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Editorial: Pill-collection boxes play role in fighting opioid crisis

Open your medicine cabinet and bathroom closet and rummage around inside in search of prescription bottles and over-the-counter medications.

Check the expiration dates. We bet you'll find at least one - and possibly many more - that have long passed their useful life.

Maybe you've forgotten they were there. Maybe you knew they were no good but had no idea how to dispose of them because of the environmental harm of flushing them down the toilet. Regardless, they have the potential to contribute to an ongoing serious drug abuse problem raging in the suburbs and nationwide.

What can you do? Gather those unwanted medications and drop them off at one of the prescription drug take-back boxes scattered throughout the suburbs that give residents a way to safely dispose of those items, so they can be incinerated before they fall into the wrong hands.

Being proactive and disposing of unwanted prescription drugs lessens easy access to drugs that young people seek for a high, experts say. It also decreases the likelihood prescription experimentation will develop into addicted use of illicit drugs like heroin.

In case you wonder how much of a difference you can make by dropping off a few dusty prescription bottles, consider the 18 boxes in DuPage County recently that pushed the amount of drugs collected beyond the 100,000-pound mark. That's 50 tons of pills. For comparison, the African savanna elephant, the largest living land animal, weighs just over eight tons.

Officials in other suburban counties say they too have seen an increase in the number of available take-back boxes being deployed and in their use by residents. Lake County and Cook County say they will hit the 100,000-pound collection milestone within eight years.

It's true that many of the drugs dropped into the boxes are relatively harmless, such as Prilosec or Tums. However, the collections also take in dangerous opioids.

"Getting those types of drugs out of the hands of people who could misuse them is an excellent way of moving forward," Bill Gentes, project coordinator for the Lake County Opioid Initiative, told our Marie Wilson. Gentes said every 100 pounds of pills turned in can yield an average of 300 doses of opioids, such as oxycodone or hydrocodone, worth roughly $600 on the street.

It's easy to see to see how the problem develops. Pills that aren't used after surgeries and illnesses sit unused in unlocked medicine cabinets. After someone dies, end-of-life hospice medications that often include morphine or other dangerous opioids can be left behind and forgotten in the grief of the moment.

Yet it's important to recognize the role such drugs play in the abuse problem and commit to doing something about them when we can.

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