Marco Forster Selected as 'Drug Take Back' Site

Teenagers at the want parents to make their medicine cabinets less tempting by trashing their prescription pills.

The club's Street Smartz members have secured as a site for the upcoming National Prescription Drug Take Back Day. Because studies show that a majority of abused prescription drugs are obtained from family and friends, including from home medicine cabinets, on April 30, people can dispose of their expired, unused or unwanted drugs anonymously with "no questions asked."

The San Juan Capistrano site is one of nine in Orange County—where between 2005 and 2007, abuse of over-the-counter and prescription drugs killed 42 people between the ages of 12 and 25. Seventeen of those deaths were in South Orange County, according to the Orange County Health Care Agency.

"I had zero concept how bad of a problem prescription drugs are, but it's a major problem," said Gerry Muir, a volunteer with San Juan's Youth Advisory Board. "Now you know, and it lights a fire under your belly."

At the first National Prescription Drug Take Back Day in September, the Drug Enforcement Agency collected 42,000 pounds of prescription drugs at nearly 4,100 sites across the country. Attempts by the Boys & Girls Club last year to put one of those sites in San Juan Capistrano never came to fruition.

By that time, though, Street Smartz members—an anti-dug group within the Boys & Girls Club—had already been active in creating their own programs to warn people of the growing abuse of prescription drugs and its dangers. In March 2010, the group recruited about 150 club members and parents to design stickers that were placed on local pharmacies' prescription bags.

Some of the stickers read "Use your heads, lock your meds"; others said "danger within reach" and depicted a small boy reaching into a medicine cabinet, the reflection of death in the mirror.

"This is a big issue," said Street Smartz member Sindy Garcia. "We care about it, and we want to make a difference."

Garcia tapped San Juan's Youth Advisory Board, on which she herself serves, as well as CREER youth, in organizing the Take Back Day's events. "We're really hoping now we can show the community that we really want to change."

In July 2008, the Orange County Health Care Agency’s alcohol and drug education and prevention team, with funding from tobacco settlement revenue, began identifying the scope of the problem in Orange County. During the yearlong initiative, the team published a study that found 11th-graders in Capistrano Unified School District were using painkillers at a higher rate than at any other school district in the county.

Painkillers are the prescription drug of choice among ninth- and 11th-graders in Orange County, and across California, the study shows.

Between 2005 and 2007, the top prescription and over-the-counter drugs contributing to overdose deaths were hydrocodone and acetaminophen Vicodin, oxycodone, methadone, diphenhydramine and morphine.

It's such statistics that Muir and Garcia said compelled them to act.

Under the coordination of the Drug Enforcement Agency, collection sites will be set up in communities from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. April 30.

Editor's Note: In an earlier version of this article, Sindy Garcia's name was misspelled.