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Pill Drop-Offs Aid Effort to Clear Medicine Cabinets

Pat McMahon Contributor
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WORCESTER, Mass. – It was not as big a draw as the playground or the hot dog truck, but the drug collection program at a busy downtown park here on Saturday still netted a few hundred bottles of prescription pills as part of a broader one-day effort to clean out the nation’s medicine cabinets.

From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., people young and old delivered bag after bag of pills, including the types of powerful painkillers and anti-anxiety drugs that the Drug Enforcement Administration, which coordinated the program nationally, was hoping for. More than anything, the goal was to empty homes of legal but dangerous drugs that the authorities say are driving addiction and crime around the country.

“We’re getting a cocktail of just about everything,” said Milton Tyrrell, a special agent for the D.E.A. in Worcester who was supervising the collection in Russell Park.

Full story: Pill Drop-Offs Aid Effort to Clear Medicine Cabinets – NYTimes.com