dont flush your leftover drugs down the toilet...

[Koda]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... fe-decline

Drugs flushed into the environment could be cause of wildlife decline

I had no idea. I thought the flushings all go to a treatment plant where the offending matter is done away with somehow I figured considering the "subject matter" and quantity it would be a pretty thorough process not much would get by. But I don’t really know what that process is, anyone?
the article admits environmental studies on flushing pharmaceuticals have not been done but shows cases where when introduced by other means, drugs have influenced wildlife. What do you think, does flushing drugs matter?

[Peder]

You can find some instructions here.

The unused and expired drugs should be treated and then disposed of. Generally they should be destroyed, as you don't want people picking up the leftover drugs and using (or selling ) them! There are many ways of doing this, a classic one is to incinerate the drugs.

[texasbb]

Yes, it's bad to flush them. The easy solution is to not have leftovers. And the easy way to not have leftovers is to not buy the drugs in the first place. We take way, way, way too many prescription drugs in this day and age. No, I'm not a doctor, but it doesn't take any credentials at all to look at the gargantuan amount we spend on drugs to know it's overdone. Pills should be a last resort, but we treat them as inevitable and as a right. We may not be killing ourselves (we're living longer), but we're destroying ourselves in many ways. Yes, we have a choice. If we didn't, drug companies wouldn't spend an order of magnitude more on consumer marketing than on research.
</rant>

[retired jerry]

or, make sure you consume all your drugs

[texasbb]

or, make sure you consume all your drugs

That only works if you give up peeing.

[Waffle Stomper]

I first heard about this topic on public radio. It is a potential problem. Drugs enter the water from both drugs flushed down the toilet and from drugs not metabolized by the body and later exit in our urine. Even DEET was found in the water. No one knows how the contaminants will interact with each other.

An interesting read about tainted fish in Puget Sound.
https://mic.com/articles/138058/salmon- ... .fCIWY1cjh

"Drugs that humans take can get into the water in a few different ways. The most obvious way is that when a person discontinues using a drug, they may flush the leftover supply down the toilet, with the effluent not properly filtered by sewage treatment plants. On other occasions, when a human takes a pill, their body may not absorb all of the drug and will eliminate the remaining amount in urine which then (ideally) will be flushed down the toilet.
https://www.rt.com/usa/333543-fish-coca ... tle-puget/

[Steve20050]

I take old pharmaceuticals to the police station. They have a collection bin and destroy them appropriately. I do mark out the personal info on the bottles as well. My local station is Tigard, but I believe many of them do this because of the water contamination issue as well as other issues. I think it is getting better known among persons who use a variety of meds for serious conditions that they should not flush old ones into our water supply.

As for why I have these, not all those folks using a variety of meds are over medicated. My wife has Post Traumatic Stress and many times the doctors are trying different scripts because folks just react different to different meds. You are always trying to find the least harmful ones Yes some of these are pretty nasty stuff. Unfortunately we are not all born equal and most of the PTS stuff starts with genetic family history that goes haywire with a trigger mechanism like wars, abuse etc. Hopefully the science will continue to get better for their sake.

[Crusak]

There's a secure collection bin in the main lobby at the Sheriff's Office where I work in Hillsboro. Just toss your prescription drugs in there and they'll be destroyed, as Steve 20050 described.

I wonder what happens to water we drink, if contaminants aren't removed before the water goes out to customers. What exactly happens with our water? It would be interesting to see what the treatment process is for drinking water.

[greenjello85]

I wonder what happens to water we drink, if contaminants aren't removed before the water goes out to customers. What exactly happens with our water? It would be interesting to see what the treatment process is for drinking water.

It varies quite a bit based on your location. C.O.P. water isn't filtered at all but it is chlorinated. Many drugs would pretty difficult to remove because they are designed to react in very specific ways, and they are so small that they are difficult to filter. A lot of places use some sort of filtering process in addition to chemical treatments.

[drm]

Water treatment mostly deals with biological agents - bacteria and the like. Chemicals are a much different issue and harder to deal with because they aren't alive and are often in solution with water so maybe can't be filtered either.

What happens when you consume them? There are so many and few have been tested properly. I remember a test of water in the Potomac River under an interstate bridge. Half of the bass caught were intersex, what most of us would call hermaphrodites. Chemicals in the water were converting males to females, or rather both. Lab tests have found that certain chemicals can do this to a mouse fetus in the womb at very specific times during development at very low densities. In other words, exposure of a fetus at times when those organs develop at the parts per billion level can cause males to develop female organs too. But at those densities there was no evidence of harm to people already born.

Were any of these chemicals pharmaceuticals? I'm not sure. One chemical that caused this in those tests of lab rats was the same one that our hiker water bottles now stop using.

So don't flush drugs down the toilet. We really have no idea what they could do, and we don't want to be tested on.