Oregon Public Broadcasting

The Oregon Senate will hold a hearing Wednesday on a proposal that would require drug manufacturers to establish pharmaceutical take-back programs.

Under the proposal, there would be no cost for consumers to return unused drugs rather than disposing of them in the trash or flushing them down the toilet.

The concern over those disposal methods is that the drugs can end up in our water supplies.

Drugs flushed down the drain are not filtered out by sewage treatment plants and drugs in landfills can leach into ground water.  Updating sewage treatment plants to filter out these drugs requires a massive amount of energy and new equipment that is generally considered cost prohibitive.

Recent improvements in water quality testing have shown trace amounts of prescription drugs in municipal drinking water supplies, rivers, and ground water.  And these drugs appear to be changing fish near sewage treatment plants. 

“There’s a lot of information out there about how we’re seeing the effeminization of male fish,” says Teresa Huntsinger, the program director for clean and healthy rivers at the Oregon Environmental Council.  “Male fish are actually becoming female because of exposure to these chemicals downstream from sewage treatment plants.”

Huntsinger says researchers have found a vast array of different chemicals in our water, including hormones and pain killers.  But it’s not clear what that means for humans.

“Really there’s just very little known about what impact that could have on human health,” says Huntsinger.

Another concern proponents of the bill are trying to address are child poisonings and teenage prescription drug abuse.

“Prescription drugs being in the home and being available is one of the ways that children get poisoned,” says Janet Gillaspie with the Oregon Association of Clean Water Agencies, a wastewater trade association that supports the bill. 

Gillaspie says the bill will help educate the public.

“To make sure that they’re cleaning out their medicine chests and getting those drugs disposed of in an environmentally sound way,” she says.

Gillaspie says a similar drug take-back program is in place in Maine.  Residents there can call a toll-free number to receive a postage paid envelope to mail their unused prescription drugs back to the drug companies.

The Oregon proposal doesn’t specify how the take-back program will work.  Under the bill, it’s up to the drug manufacturers to develop a collection plan for unused drugs. 

Collected drugs would then be incinerated or treated as hazardous waste. 

But the majority of prescription drugs get into our water by passing through our bodies.

“That’s a much more difficult problem to solve,” says Gillaspie.  “Our industry and a lot of people nationally, along with EPA, are doing a lot of research on that issue.  But we’re advocating that this percentage that we can solve through pollution prevention -- that should be our logical first step while we study and learn more about drugs that are coming through our systems.” 

A spokeswoman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America declined to be identified or quoted for this story.  But she says PhRMA opposes the bill for several reasons.

She says the majority of drugs that end up in water supplies come from passing through humans, and the bill does nothing to address that.

She also says there should be a stronger focus on patient compliance with prescription medicines.  In other words, if patients followed their prescriptions properly, there wouldn't be any unused medicine for disposal.

PhARMA, she says, would like to see more education about proper disposal methods rather than a take-back program.  For example, unused medicine should not be flushed down the drain.  It should be mixed with coffee grounds or kitty litter and placed in the trash.  The coffee grounds or kitty litter help prevent people from digging through trash for the drugs, she says.

And, she says, it's not true that drugs disposed of in landfills can leach into ground water.

For more information, she recommends checking out PhARMA's website on disposal of prescription drugs.