Pennsylvania marked a milestone this year with its Drug Take Back Program, having officially collected more than 200 tons of old or unused prescription and other drugs, Attorney General Josh Shapiro announced Thursday.
“That’s 200 tons that are no longer sitting in the bottom of medicine cabinets or being pushed on the street corners in Pittsburgh or across Pennsylvania,” Shapiro said. “That’s 200 tons, importantly, out of reach of children in the commonwealth.”
Those drugs, collected from across the state, have all come since Shapiro took office in 2017.
Shapiro made the announcement alongside Mt. Lebanon police, a department that instituted its own drug take back box in 2013.
“That box was very successful,” said Chief Aaron Lauth. A second box was added in 2018, he said, and 10,000 pounds of drugs have been collected in Mt. Lebanon alone.
Shapiro said informal reviews indicate around 15% to 20% of the drugs turned in are opioids.
Earlier this summer, Shaprio’s office hosted its third take-back day at Pocono Raceway during a NASCAR doubleheader in June. Previous collections at the raceway have yielded more than 150 pounds of drugs.
More than 5,700 Pennsylvanians succumbed to drug overdoses in 2020, with 689 in Allegheny County. Shapiro said the numbers equal out to about 14 overdose deaths per day.
“Pre-pandemic, we were losing 12 Pennsylvanians every day,” he said. “Because of the isolation, because of the challenges of covid, those numbers are, sadly, rising.”
Shapiro pointed to a history of criminal and civil charges filed by his office in drug cases but said the effort cannot stop there.
“Because we know,” he said, “that four out of every five heroin users their pathway to addiction by abusing a prescription drug – a prescription drug that they find in a friend or relative’s medicine cabinet.”
