It’s as if Obama is saying, “Ha! I’d like to see how CO2 could possibly tear apart this week’s address.”
Somehow, I managed.
According to the president, Saturday the 26th was “National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day.”
“It’s a day where you can safely, conveniently, and responsibly dispose of expired and unwanted prescription drugs at collection sites in your community,” Obama said.
Or you could just throw them in the garbage or flush them down the toilet.
Obama explains the reason for the drug take-back program:
Here’s why this matters. More Americans now die every year from drug overdoses than they do in car crashes. And most of those deaths aren’t due to drugs like cocaine or heroin – but rather prescription drugs. In 2013 alone, overdoses from prescription pain medications killed more than 16,000 Americans. And most young people who begin misusing prescription drugs don’t buy them in some dark alley – they get them from the medicine cabinet.
If that’s not a good enough reason to participate in “National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day,” here’s another. Many prescription pain medications belong to the same class of drugs as heroin. In fact, four in five heroin users started out by misusing prescription drugs. And over the course of just one year, between 2013 and 2014, we saw a 33% increase in the number of heroin users.
Great, more numbers! What would a weekly address to the nation be without them? These are the scary kind of numbers, though. Not like the ones he’s been using to show how freaking cool America has become ever since he started fixing everything for us.
Obama’s correct that more deaths were caused by drugs than car crashes. The CDC says that in 2013, 46,471 deaths were drug-induced, while motor vehicle accidents caused 35,369 deaths that year. For added perspective, 33,636 deaths were attributed to the use of firearms in 2013.
Speaking of firearms, drug take-back programs remind me of gun buy-back programs. They’re likely as effective. In other words, hardly effective, if at all.
Also like gun buy-back programs, drug take-back programs are costly. They cost the drug manufacturers money, so the consumers end up paying more. The bill would also be passed down to taxpayers.
Here’s the deal.
The Supreme Court recently refused to review a lawsuit filed by the pharmaceutical industry against California’s Alameda County over a three-year old ordinance that shifted the costs of drug take-back programs from the county onto the companies that make the drugs. At least two other counties in California and one in Washington have similar laws in place that make it mandatory for drug companies to pay for the drug take-back programs.
It’s like making ammunition manufacturers pay the government for people to hand over their unused…never mind. The government doesn’t need help coming up with any more bright ideas.
About a dozen more local jurisdictions are now considering putting mandatory medicinal take-back programs in place. Legislators in states such as New York and California have been making attempts to pass take-back program mandates, as well.
Prescription drug take-back programs are the in thing now. Seeing as the Supreme Court decided that drug companies can be forced to pay for the costs of their consumers’ unused products, why not make Big Pharma pay for it? It’s the right thing to do–for humans and for the planet.
That’s what Obama wants you to believe.
Now consider what will happen as this drug take-back mandate continues to look appealing to additional local and state lawmakers. The cost for Alameda County to operate the drug take-back program was around $330,000 a year. The pharmaceutical companies argued that the program could cost them up to a million dollars. That’s for one county. The amount it would cost if every county in every state across the entire country had this largely pointless mandate in place would be astronomical. There’s no way the pharmaceutical companies would be able to pay for it without drastically raising the price of their products.
People are outraged over the cost of one drug going from 13 bucks a pill to 750 bucks. Think about how much your prescriptions would cost with a national take-back program in place. Think about the added costs to health insurance. Think about how the higher drug costs will be passed on to taxpayers through government assistance programs like Medicare Part D. Think about how progressives would use these effects to get even closer to their goal of convincing the public that we need a completely socialized health care system.
It’s another piece in their big-picture jigsaw puzzle.
These take-back initiatives are not only costly, they are in fact more harmful to the environment than merely flushing the drugs or throwing them in the garbage.
Regarding the environmental effects of flushing unused prescription drugs, the FDA says:
Some people are questioning the practice of flushing certain medicines because of concerns about trace levels of drug residues found in surface water, such as rivers and lakes, and in some community drinking water supplies.
“The main way drug residues enter water systems is by people taking medicines and then naturally passing them through their bodies,” says Raanan Bloom, Ph.D., an environmental assessment expert at FDA. “Many drugs are not completely absorbed or metabolized by the body and can enter the environment after passing through wastewater treatment plants.”
“While FDA and the Environmental Protection Agency take the concerns of flushing certain medicines in the environment seriously, there has been no indication of environmental effects due to flushing,” Bloom says.
“Nonetheless, FDA does not want to add drug residues into water systems unnecessarily,” adds [FDA pharmacist Jim] Hunter.
The environmental effects of flushing drugs down the sink or toilet are less than negligible and drug residues end up in the water system after passing through a person’s body anyway. As much as they might like to, neither environmentalists nor the government will get people to stop peeing in toilets and urinals. But it would be great if people wouldn’t flush their unused drugs if they didn’t have to because a handful of paranoid nature nuts fear that trace amounts of toxins in the water could harm Mother Earth. Thanks, we’ll keep that in mind, U.S. Government.
It doesn’t take much to understand that taking a trip to a drug-disposal site is more harmful on the environment than tossing or flushing your drugs. I just looked for my nearest government-approved prescription drug disposal drop-off location, and it’s over a half-hour drive round trip. It’s in a crime-infested part of town, too.
So no. I’ll take my chances with poisoning the water supply if I’m worried about someone picking pills out of my garbage. Because I care for Mother Earth. And I could make better use of my time and carbon emitting.
The University of Michigan looked into the different methods of prescription drug disposal in 2012. While the authors frowned on flushing drugs into the sewer system, they confirmed that the easiest solution is the best solution:
The new evidence suggests that discarding unused drugs in the trash is a better option to limit the risk of poisoning and at the same time curb pollution of both water and air. …
“National policy seems to be changing to support take-back programs, and we don’t know if that’s justified,” said Sherri Cook, a doctoral student in the U-M Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. …
The new study found:
- If half of people threw away unused medications and half took them back to the drug store, the amount of active pharmaceutical ingredients in the environment would be reduced by 93 percent compared with today.
- If everyone trashed their extra drugs, those amounts would be reduced by 88 percent.
- That 5 percent improvement in pharmaceutical emission reduction due to take-back programs would come at a significant cost, possibly more than a billion dollars annually, along with a 300 percent increase in other emissions such as greenhouse gases and smog-forming substances.
“Nobody has ever added up all the emissions associated with disposing of medication,” said Steve Skerlos, a professor in the departments of Mechanical Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering and a co-author of the study. “When you look at the available evidence to support take-back, it just doesn’t add up.”
Indeed, the hassle of disposing prescription drugs through take-back initiatives does not add up. But the costs can add up quite a bit.
Obama doesn’t want people to think about those costs. Instead, he goes for the emotional push in order to make Americans want more government control over their lives.
All of this takes a terrible toll on too many families, in too many communities, all across the country – big and small, urban and rural. It strains law enforcement and treatment programs. It costs all of us – in so many different ways.
That’s why, four years ago, my Administration unveiled a Prescription Drug Abuse Prevention Plan. We’ve been partnering with communities to combat overdoses, and we’re seeing some promising results. That’s why the budget I put forward this year would build on those efforts. It would make critical investments in things like drug monitoring programs, equipping more first responders to save more lives, and expanding medication-assisted treatment programs – including in our prisons.
INVESTMENTS!
I wondered how long before he would get to using one of his favorite deceptive, illusory words. One more time–it means he wants to spend more of your money, America.
President Obama continues his address by promoting the idea that getting treatment for non-violent drug offenders is better than incarcerating them. On some level, I agree. But forcing drug abusers to go into some sort of rehab treatment is not effective in all cases. Individuals have to want to stop using. Trying to force people into quitting can make them want to rebel–just as teens want to rebel against their parents, just as people want to rebel against the police.
So instead of filling up prisons, we should believe that the solution is to build more rehab facilities. With all the added rehabilitation venues to take care of non-violent drug offenders, we’ll eventually reach a point where rehab will have done its job and the venues will work themselves out of business, right?
I also take some issue with Obama calling drug abuse a disease. Addiction is a behavior. It’s a habit. People with diseases need an external cure, a medicinal cure. People with addictions need the cure to come from within. Calling it a disease takes the responsibility away from the people who are addicted and makes it sound like they are helpless–or powerless–to the substances they abuse. Powerless to an inanimate object? As they do with people who use firearms to commit violent acts, the progressive tendency is to blame the object, not the person using the object.
In reality, everyone else is unable to do little more than offer support and guidance to the substance abuser. It’s up to the addict to have the will to keep off the substance he or she abuses. Only when the individual can muster the inner strength to overcome an addictive behavior can that person find true independence.
Obama says that the money saved from incarceration can be used to focus on going after trafficking, gangs, druglords, and “the real threats to our communities.” Hah, that’s a good one. Legislators won’t transfer tax money over to different areas of the justice system. They’ll just raise taxes for those things while spending more money on those rehab efforts.
I also agree with Obama that we need “better prescribing practices.” I believe we are an overmedicated society, as evidenced by the steep rise is prescription drug sales. I also think people go to the hospital or doctor way more often than they need to, and that’s a major reason why the health care industry has reached its current enormous state. There should be some sort of rehab program for medical dependency abuse. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is such a thing somewhere.
There’s probably an even lengthier rant on that topic waiting to pour out of me at some point, but not today.
Obama tells us, “And we all have a role to play here” to reduce the use of drugs, which is simply another variant of “it takes a village” or “all your kids are belong to us.”
Obama also mentions “evidence-based treatment, prevention, and recovery.” This favors a collective solution to individual problems. Not everyone will take to treatment the same. Each case should be handled differently. Basing treatment on a set of common standards derived from known factors dismisses the experiences of practitioners who may have different approaches than the norm in handling unique situations that don’t fall within particular boxes.
In case you didn’t know (I didn’t). Obama’s current drug czar–National Drug Control Policy Director Michael Botticelli–is a recovering alcoholic who experimented with drugs in his younger days. The president mentions him near the end of the address. I haven’t looked into Botticelli’s background at great length. As long as he’s been sober for a good enough time, that part of his past shouldn’t disqualify him from the position.
Obama warns us that he’ll be talking more to America about drug issues in the weeks ahead. Be ready to be told you have to do something about it. We’ll see how much it involves personal responsibility compared to community and national involvement.
Oh, sorry. Investment. I’m already sensing which way this will go.
