U.S. effort aims to reclaim pill bottles in effort to curb addiction
On Saturday, police at over 4,000 locations across the U.S. will oversee a prescription drug take-back program aimed at getting citizens to surrender old bottles of pills like Vicodin, Percocet and Xanax. Opiate painkillers and other prescription drugs are driving addiction and crime at rates never seen, as addicts raid medicine cabinets of the sick and elderly, the New York Times reports. Saturday’s effort will be coordinated by the Drug Enforcement Administration, and is the first of its kind with a national scope. In 17 U.S. states, death from prescription and illegal drugs now exceed those from motor vehicle accidents, and opiate painkillers are mostly to blame. The number of people seeking treatment for painkiller addiction rose 400 per cent from 1998 to 2008, the daily reports.