Prescription collection effort continues

In its first two events, Operation Medicine Cabinet received a cardboard box full of injectable steroids, a large plastic garbage bag filled with pill bottles dating back more than 30 years and a bucket of pills taken from a casino hotel room.

The types of people dropping off their unused pills range from the elderly to doctors wanting to dispose of expired samples.

Altogether, the program has collected more than 380,000 pills as part of an effort to prevent adolescents from taking them from family members. The third event Saturday continues the effort.

"We want to remove temptation," said Paul Oesterman, an associate professor of pharmacy at the University of Southern Nevada, where students started the program.

The private university's students, along with Henderson police, will be collecting people's unused pills and medications in the parking lot of the Galleria Mall in Henderson between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. The Metropolitan Police Department also is hosting roundups at its northeast, northwest and enterprise area commands.

Pills should be properly disposed of, not thrown away or flushed down the toilet, Oesterman said. Operation Medicine Cabinet incinerates everything collected.

Although authorities have detected trace amounts of pharmaceuticals in the water at Lake Mead, a Las Vegas Valley Water District spokesman said those amounts, considered harmless, are from drugs that have gone through people's systems and enter the water system in the form of waste.

Saturday's operation is more geared toward preventing the growing trend of youths taking and abusing prescription drugs, Oesterman said.

For children between the ages of 12 and 17, prescription pills are the most abused drug, according to Henderson police officer Nicole Guess. And she said prescription drugs often lead to more serious addictions.

"These kids are not going to the gateway drugs anymore. They're going from pills to heroin," Guess said.

One in five high schools students said they had taken prescription drugs without a prescription, a 2009 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found. For 12th graders, the rate was one in four.

It has become popular for a few reasons: it's accessible and teens have the perception that the drugs are safe, Oesterman said.

"Well, it was safe for a patient for whom it's intended," he said. Outside of that, "it's very risky."

It's more accessible than illegal drugs because prescription pills are in homes.

"They can just walk across the hall to someone's medicine cabinet, take a couple and maybe sell the rest of the bottle at school for a lot of money," Guess said.

Guess remembers when she was a patrol officer responding to a home where a teenager had stolen heart medication from his grandfather.

"Not only was the trust broken between that relationship, that medication was so restricted that the grandfather didn't know if he could get a refill for it," she said.

Guess attended the other Operation Medicine Cabinet events where she was stunned by the amount of old pills that people had kept. Some of the bottles dated back to the '70s and '80s.

"People were unloading their minivan with a massive moving box of pills," she said.

People can drop off their items with no questions asked.

Contact reporter Lawrence Mower at lmower@review journal.com or 702-383-0440.