Bellmore-Merrick drug take-back yields thousand pounds of pills

“All of us were shocked by how great it went,” said David Seinfeld, the Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District’s assistant superintendent for instruction.

He was referring to Drug Take-Back Day, sponsored by the Central District and the Bellmore-Merrick Community Parent Center and held at Mepham High School on May 30. The event, the second one in the community in the past eight months, yielded a thousand pounds of medications, representing thousands of the opioid prescription pain pills that many teenagers abuse.

An estimated 400 people came to Mepham to get rid of their unused and unwanted pain-relief pills, along with enough needles to fill two large boxes.

With help from Central District and Parent Center volunteers, Nassau County police collected the drugs, and working with the North Shore-LIJ Health System, the Bellmore, Merrick, North Bellmore and North Merrick fire departments took care of the sharps.

“The word has gotten out that it’s just not safe to dispose of the drugs any other way” than a drug take-back, said Saul Lerner, the Central District health, phys. ed. and athletic director, who will retire in June.

Parent Center Executive Director Wendy Tepfer said that drug take-back events are teaching people to clean out their medicine cabinets in the spring and fall, along with their homes.

Many people expressed concern about how the drugs would be disposed of, Seinfeld said. Many, he added, had heard about the environmental concerns associated with flushing medications down the toilet and wanted to be sure that the drugs would be destroyed in an environmentally friendly way.

The medications are incinerated.

Seinfeld said that many people had kept their medications “for years.”

“This was truly a school-community effort, and 33 bags [of medications] is evidence of that,” Lerner said. “Without the parent center, none of this would have happened.”