Roughly half of a 10-gallon bucket was filled with drugs set for disposal at NorWest Community Health Centre’s Annual Drug Amnesty Day event.
The event allows residents to dispose of expired and unused medications properly and safely.
Residents can also use the opportunity to dispose of illegal drugs and drug paraphernalia confidentially without risk of prosecution.
“It’s incredibly important that we get any unused, expired, or unwanted medications out of the community for safety,” explained Director of Mental Health & Substance Use Programs Brittany D’Angelo.
“We don’t want medications to be used for any unintended purposes or criminal activities, we also want to get medications out of households because they can be unintentionally ingested by, let’s say children or animals and have a poisoning event.”
Properly disposing of medications and not flushing them down the toilet or throwing them in the trash also protects our waterways from contamination.
This year’s event was a little slower than prior years.
“I think that we could have got the word out there a little bit better and there’s construction happening around our health centre right now, but it’s really important for everyone to know that any time of the year, any day you can bring your expired medications into your local pharmacy and they will dispose of them properly,” added D’Angelo.
Medication collected at Drug Amnesty Day – (CJ Goater/Acadia Broadcasting)
