Project Medicine Drop Takes In 5,400 Pounds Of Pills, Prosecutor Says

How do you keep prescription medications out of the wrong hands? One pill at a time.

In 2015, Ocean County residents participating in Project Medicine Drop have done that to the tune of thousands of pills: More than 5,400 pounds of unused prescription medications have been turned in through the program where residents can drop off unused medications at their local police departments, said Al Della Fave, spokesman for the prosecutor’s office.

“Unused medications often end up in the wrong hands, are used illegally, or find their way into our water supply,” Della Fave said. “In the worst case scenarios these forgotten pain-killing medications lead to addiction or teens becoming unwitting drug dealers.”

Project Medicine Drop is the countywide initiative to make disposal of unused medications easy and convenient for Ocean County residents. The collected pills are incinerated at coordinated pill burns, and Della Fave said the most recent one, on July 17, destroyed 2,500 pounds of pills.

Pill weights are typically measured in milligrams, and pills weights can vary, with averages of 100 to 500 milligrams being common, according to several websites offering legal advice. With that in mind, the number of pills that have been incinerated so far this year is in the millions. One pound equals 453,592 milligrams, so 1 pound of pills could contain roughly as few as 900 pills or as many as 4,500, depending on the pill. That means, at a minimum, more than 2 million pills have been incinerated.

“It can be difficult to comprehend the amount of medications to account for such a huge total,“ Della Fave said. Photos on the prosecutor’s office’s Facebook page show detectives loading the pills into a box truck for transport to the burn, he said, and “should give you a good sense of the astounding volume.”

“The stiff backs of the detectives can certainly attest to it,” he said.

Towns that participate by having easily accessible medication drop boxes at police department entrances are: Brick, Barnegat, Berkeley, Jackson, Lacey, Lakewood, Little Egg Harbor Township, Long Beach, Manchester Township, Ocean, Point Pleasant, Seaside Heights, Stafford, Toms River and Tuckerton. There also is a Project Medicine Drop box at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst that was installed earlier this year.

For more information on Project Medicine Drop, go to: www.njconsumeraffairs.gov/meddrop or www.oceancountyprosecutor.org.