GRANITE FALLS, Wash. - Tyler Vaughan was 18 years old when on August 29 of 2010 he died of a drug overdose. But it wasn't from meth, or cocaine, or crack or heroin. It was a prescription drug hidden in a living room cabinet for a few days awaiting disposal at the local solid waste transfer station. He found them first.
"When you see your kid has like blue lips, there's something wrong," said Tyler's mother Rebecca Runyon.
Runyon says it's estimated her son took 40 pills. She thinks he believed if he took enough of the gout medication it would result in the same high as an Oxycotin tablet. But she says her son made a fatal assumption. The gout medication relieved joint pain by shrinking swelling - not as a narcotic. In Tyler's body the prescription medicine amounted to a poison.
Runyon and Tyler's step-dad Andrew Maggard testified in the 2011 legislative session on behalf of a bill that would allow organizations the option to run a drug collection site financed by drug companies. The bill failed that year, and proponents fear it could fail again this year.
Right now, you can take many drugs, even containing narcotics, to a local police station or sheriff's office where the staff has been trained to receive them, and the drugs are gathered up under tight controls and incinerated.
Such a disposal box is located at the Granite Falls police station. But the box in the small police station is only available during business hours Monday through Friday. Not on the weekends. There aren't that many police stations and the public is largely unaware that they exist.
"We have 28 sites. There are 150 pharmacies in the county," says Pat Slack, Commander of the Snohomish Regional Drug Task Force, which interfaces with law enforcment agencies across the county.
Slack says Bartell's pharmacies can also take back some drugs.
But overall the drug industry has lobbied against the legislation. Those opposed argue that better public education about the dangers would be more productive than an industry paid take back program that if passed could be the first in the U.S. They point to Vancouver, B.C., Canada where such a take back program is in effect, but relatively few people actually avail themselves of the opportunity to clear risk from their medicine cabinets.
It's hard to know even in Tyler's case if the program would have made a difference as his parents planned to take the drugs (that came from a deceased relatives home that was being cleaned out) and dispose of them at the dump anyway. But his death illustrates what can happen, and does happen across the country when what is prescribed with the expertise of a doctor ends up in the hands of someone who has no idea what he's about to pop into his mouth.
To add a comment, please register or login.