This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Crime & Safety

Drug Disposal Box Unveiled by Police and D.A.

Police Chief Barry Pilla and District Attorney David Heckler displayed the Med-Return box that will be available 24/7 at the police station.

Northampton Township is the first municipality in Pennsylvania to offer a secure drug collection site that is open to the public around the clock, officials announced Thursday morning.

The green collection unit will be placed, under constant watch, in the lobby of the police department located on Township Road.

Police Chief Barry Pilla said the idea for the installation of the Med-Return drug collection unit came from requests from township residents who wanted to dispose of old medications. Recently police departments across the county held several drug take back events. In Northampton alone the events netted more than 350 pounds of no longer needed perscriptions and resident tell officials they have more to turn-in.

Find out what's happening in Northamptonwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

“[The drugs] could have easily ended up in our ecosystem, on the illegal market or worse – in the hands of our children,” Pilla said.

Prescription drugs are a growing problem across America. One in five high schoolers admitted to taking prescription drugs that they were not prescribed, according to a 2009 CDC survey.

Find out what's happening in Northamptonwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Another CDC study found that prescription drugs are now the second most abused drug group, behind only marijuana.

District Attorney David Heckler said that besides keeping drugs off the street, the box will keep drugs out of the water supply. Flushing prescription drugs down the toilet cycles them into the public water supply and is thought to have been one of the causes behind the formation of drug-resistant bacteria.

The cost of the $900 box was equally split between the Northampton Township Police Department, Bucks County District Attorney Office’s Forfeiture Fund and Council Rock Coalition for Healthier Youth.

“From my standpoint it’s not taxpayer money that is going into this. It’s the drug dealers of Bucks County,” Heckler said.

Heckler’s office provided its portion of the money from the Forfeiture Fund, a fund that is made up of cash seized in drug raids and the sale of seized property.

Heckler also pledged that his department will pay one third of the cost of the units to any police department in the county that is interested in getting one. He also suggested that local community groups could help with the rest of the funding for the locked green boxes.

In the week since the box has been available to the public in Northampton, about a dozen containers of pills have disposed of, Pilla said.

The box will be emptied on an as-needed basis, and once turned over to county officials, the contents be incinerated, officials told reporters.

Pilla pointed out that Quakertown Borough also has a Med-Return unit, but that is not available to the public 24 hours a day.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?

To request removal of your name from an arrest report, submit these required items to arrestreports@patch.com.