Attorney general visits Wayne
By Joey Pitchford
Published in News on March 25, 2018 3:05 AM
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News-Argus/CASEY MOZINGO
Attorney General Josh Stein talks with Wayne UNC Health Care President Janie Jaberg Saturday on his visit to the hospital for Operation Medicine Drop.
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News-Argus/CASEY MOZINGO
Pills are counted out before they are put in a box to be stored at the Goldsboro Police Department and later incinerated.
There were around 700 million pills prescribed in North Carolina in 2016 -- 70 pills for each person in the state -- N.C. Attorney General Josh Stein said at the Safe Kids Wayne County "Operation Medicine Drop" event Saturday.
The event, which began Monday and ended Saturday, gave Wayne County residents the chance to safely dispose of those unwanted, unused or expired medications that may have built up in their medicine cabinets.
By the time the final day of operations started up, the program had already collected around 100,000 units of medication, whether that be in individual pills or single doses of liquid medicine, said Safe Kids Wayne County coordinator Shelly Willis.
"The goal is to bring awareness to people getting rid of the medication they don't need," she said. "Kids could get a hold of them and not know what they're doing, because a lot of medicines look like candy."
Stein's visit to Goldsboro capped off a week of visiting other medicine drop events in Asheville, Charlotte, High Point and Raleigh. He said that taking a comprehensive approach combining treatment and prevention vital to combating the nationwide opioid epidemic, the impact of which has been acutely felt in Wayne County.
"We need to do a lot more with treatment, because there are tens of thousands of people who are addicted to the painkillers and to heroin, and we need to help those people get healthy," he said. "We're not doing a good job in that regard here in the United States at all."
Stein said that the end goal of getting opioids out of people's homes is to help them avoid getting on the wrong track.
"Everybody just wants to live a life where they make decisions and work and have a family and relationships, and when you're in addiction, it's very hard to do any of those things," he said.
To that end, Stein's office worked with the N.C. General Assembly to draft the Strengthen Opioid Misuse Prevention Act, which set limits on the quantity of opioid which doctors can prescribe for various kinds of injuries.
Safe Kids Wayne County, which is the local chapter of Safe Kids NC, partners with local law enforcement to make sure the drugs are safely taken care of. The Wayne County Sheriff's Department Annex at 1916 U.S. 117 Alt. has a box where community members can dispose of excess medication at any time, said Sheriff Larry Pierce.
Pierce said that it is fairly common to see children, knowingly or not, get their hands on their parents' excess medication and end up getting themselves or other people hooked on them. He urged people to get rid of their medication as soon as it either expires or they no longer need it, for the sake of their own loved ones and the people in their community.
The Goldsboro Police Department does not typically accept excess medication, but plays a substantial role in Operation Medicine Drop, said GPD Cpl. Marissa Davis.
"We're here more for security," she said. "After we collect the medication, we'll take it back and store it at the Goldsboro Police Department until May 1. After that, we'll take it to the SBI lab in Greenville, where they will incinerate it."