Expired Medicine

I have a bunch of medicine in my medicine box, some of it prescription from surgeries and such this year. I doubt I'll have a need for them since I tried to ween myself off them sooner than I should have anyway.

In order to make sure I disposed of them in a proper way, I googled it. Because that's what you do when you need information nowadays. What I found wasn't that encouraging.

You could always just throw it away. (Unfortunately, people or animals might get to it in the trash and that's not a great idea. One article said if you don't have a choice but to throw it away, you should take it out of the medicine bottle and put it in something else and conceal it with other things like coffee grounds or kitty poop or something)

You could flush it. (But now that's in our water supply. I thought it was gross when Chicago put out its annual report of the test done on our water from Lake Michigan and what they found in it. Gross. Gross. Gross. And yet, I'm told I should drink tap over bottled water. Hmmm.)


You could return it to your pharmacist. (Some of them have drop off bins or just take them back. But there's something about that I don't like. Maybe it has to do with some 20/20 report I saw where the pharmacist were not giving people the right medicine in an effort to save money and people ended up dead. What if they take my expired medicine and give it to someone else and they get sick. I just don't trust them.)


You could donate it to a third world country. (Umm. When I came across this option, I was quickly offended. We can't sell expired medicine in our stores but its good enough to send to someone who is less fortunate. Like "oh, the apple is rotten and I'd never buy it but send it to Africa, at least its something." Yeah, that option just doesn't work for me.)

So I still haven't found an answer and I just have a box full of all kinds of medicines that I no longer need. What am I supposed to do with it?



throw away
flush
give back to pharmacy
donate to third world countries