On Saturday, September 29, unwanted medications can be dropped off for safe disposal at Middletown PD from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Here's some background on the initiative published we have previously published about the Initiative. 

Middletown police will tell you that it has been their experience lately that most kids who abuse drugs had their first experience experimenting with pills they pilfered from their parents’ medicine cabinet.

It’s where they get “their first hit,” said Lt. John Maguire, who also sits on theMiddletown Municipal Alliance for the Prevention of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, at the organization’s Reaching Out forum. “The trend that we’ve seen over the past decade is that the first drug that is normally abused now is a prescription drug,”

A typical occurrence, Alliance head Mike Slover said, is for kids to peruse the medicine cabinets, collect anything they can find and throw everything into a big bowl at a party. They then ingest the medications, without regard to possible interaction and/or overdose implications. It’s a dangerous experiment that feeds prescription drug addiction, danger and even death, Slover said.

“They don’t think they can die,” he said at the Reaching Out meeting. “They don’t think they can kill someone else. They’re partying.”

One way to stave off this practice and fuel the fight against prescription drug abuse is to not only keep the drugs out of kids’ reach, but to regularly clear cabinets of unused or old prescriptions.

This weekend you can do just that and bring the drugs to a safe place for disposal.

As part of the federal Drug Enforcement Agency’s (DEA) annual Take Back Initiative, people are encouraged to drop off all their unwanted, unused and/or expired medications for safe disposal. Police advise that people should bring medications only — no needles.

In last year's October Operation Take Back New Jersey, 9,831 pounds of pills and other medications were collected, according to the Monmouth County Sheriff's Office. According to the DEA, 377,086 pounds were collected nationwide

For more information, call Middletown police at 732-615-2039. For more information about the program, contact the DEA at 1-800-882-9539.