It is spring cleaning time, and while we may be sorting our closets, garage, and other spaces, one area that is commonly overlooked is the medicine cabinet. There happens to be an entire day dedicated to focusing on this area. National Clean Out Your Medicine Cabinet Day is Friday, April 16. The day aims to raise awareness and effectively rid homes of unused or expired prescription and over-the-counter medications sitting in medicine cabinets, nightstands, or kitchen cabinets that have the potential for misuse or abuse. How you dispose of your expired or unused medications is just as important as why. Environmental studies show that flushed medications flow into our water supply and negatively impact the fish we eat and the water we drink. When discarded in the trash, medications leach into and contaminate the soil.
For Your Health: Spring cleaning for your medicine cabinet
There’s something about the warmer, sunnier weather of spring that brings out the urge to purge for many people.
Spring cleaning tasks can include washing windows, cleaning carpets and emptying out cluttered closets. It’s a therapeutic chore for many, as a way to put the darker days of winter behind and embrace a new season.
It can also be a good time to clean out any unused and expired medicines or prescriptions from your medicine cabinets.
When was the last time you checked expiration dates on those bottles of aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen and even antacid tablets? Leftover pain medications or prescriptions that have expired are of no use to you now and can actually be a public safety issue, posing risks for accidental poisoning, misuse and overdoses, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency.
The number of overdose deaths in Lebanon County surged in 2020 to 39, up from 28 in 2019 and 27 in both 2018 and 2017, in a change that the county coroner and other local individuals with experience in the drug and alcohol field link to the coronavirus pandemic.
James Donmoyer, executive director of Lebanon County s Commission On Drug And Alcohol Abuse, said there could be a lot of factors behind the increase last year and couldn t confirm what the pandemic had to do with it, but did link the deaths to a timeline of the pandemic.
“We didn’t have any in March. Then in April and May, when things loosened up as far as COVID restrictions, our biggest month was May, with eight deaths,” he said. “As we came out of lockdown, our numbers went up.
ELKTON â The loudest sound at the Youth Empowerment Services (YES) office in Elkton is the laughter as dance music blasts in the background. Eleven members of the Drug Free Cecil Youth Coalition used the office as a home base to attend the national Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America (CADCA) conference on drug use prevention last Thursday.
âWhy would teenagers want to come if we werenât having a good time,â said Beth Creek, the director of YES, when asked about the unexpectedly joyful atmosphere.
Usually, these students would be spending several days at the National Harbor, culminating in a visit to Capitol Hill to meet with government officials. On Thursday, the high-school students spoke to Representative Andy Harris and a representative for Senator Chris Van Hollen. Before Van Hollenâs aideâs face covered the screen, Drug Free Cecil discussed their strategy for how to showcase the importance of federal funding to their drug prevention.