The City safely disposed of more than three Muni buses worth of unused medication in the first five years of a program aiming to prevent the drugs from being sold illegally and polluting the environment, San Francisco officials announced Tuesday.
Mayor London Breed’s office said San Francisco’s Safe Medicine Disposal Program diverted more than 140,000 pounds of medication from 2017 to 2022, which Environment Department Director Tyrone Jue equated to nearly 3½ Muni buses.
“What people should imagine is driving three Muni buses directly into the San Francisco Bay and that being the amount of medication we prevented from getting out there,” said Jue, whose department oversees the program.
Spawning from a 2015 ordinance then-Supervisor Breed sponsored, the program launched in 2017 in an effort to prevent unused medications from being sold illegally; accidentally coming into contact with children, pets and wildlife; and poisoning the environment.
“This is a free program that is simple and convenient for residents to participate in, and the benefits are significant,” Breed said in Tuesday’s release. “This is remarkable to see, almost a decade later, how the program continues to offer major benefits to our city.”
Residents can drop off their old prescriptions or over-the-counter medications to 62 collection kiosks throughout The City at police stations, Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital’s outpatient pharmacy, Kaiser Permanente and several retail pharmacies.
People also have the option to dispose of their medications through the mail, with mail-back envelopes available at 164 distribution sites. There are also one-day disposal events through the program, which pharmaceutical companies fund.
The locations of the kiosks are determined by guidelines put out by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, Jue said, including places where pharmaceuticals are already being prescribed or given out, law-enforcement agencies and narcotics treatment programs.
“You have to have these locations in convenient spots and those convenient spots are where people are typically picking up their prescription medication,” he said. “And then they’re dropping off their old ones at the same time.”
The unsafe disposal of medications can pose dire risks for the environment — particularly in water systems, Jue said, which makes the program important.
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“All of these medications, if you don’t properly dispose of them, wind up in our landfills going into the groundwater,” he said. “They wind up bypassing our sewage treatment plants and going directly out into our water bodies.”
Antibiotics, for instance, can affect the endocrine system in fish, affecting their hormones and their ability to reproduce.
“When those compounds build up in the tissue, they enter right back into the life cycle of the animals eating those fish,” Jue said. “That’s why these programs are really important in terms of closing the loop and making sure these medications are winding up in the right place.”
The unsafe disposal of medication has severe health consequences as well, such as more being taken and sold illegally or people accidentally harming themselves by coming into contact with medication.
“The misuse of prescription medications can lead to hospitalization or death from unintentional overdose or poisoning,” said Dr. Grant Colfax, the director of health at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, in Tuesday’s release. “Medication collection sites like those we have in San Francisco, are a valuable and necessary service that helps people to prevent medications in their name from hurting someone.”
Jue said the program diverted close to 25,000 pounds a year in its first five operations, but it wasn’t clear how that compares to the amount of medication floating around San Francisco Bay right now.
But “it shows just the scale of how much medication is out in The City at any given time,” Jue said.
Given the success of the program measured over that five-year period, Jue said The City added another 20 kiosks last year, and the success of those kiosks are going to be evaluated in an April report.
“We just also updated our program rules and regulations that are going to increase the number even further over the next year or two,” he said, noting that the department will additionally expand its mail-in program and hold more community events.
“It’s all growing in size because we want to make this program easy and accessible to the public,” he said.
