Shouldn’t this man have some pain medication before his 40 minute trip? One of us asked.

The nurse said, Oh, he will get pain medication when he gets to the hospice facility.

Before those bottles were emptied and the contents mixed with dish soap, we begged the nurse to take one pain tablet and crush it and put it under the man’s tongue, as it appeared he was quite uncomfortable.

It was a sad scene that added incredible stress and pain.   We are not a young group and we found it very odd that eliminating the possibility of prescription drug abuse trumped caring for a man in his dying hours.

Gotta say though our planet’s water sources sure don’t need more pharmaceuticals pollution. Not in freshwater sources, not in ocean waters. These contaminants are not good for animals, plants, people, etc. 

http://www.ewg.org/node/26128

http://www.alternet.org/story/43242/how_prescription_drugs_are_poisoning_our_waters

http://www.noaa.gov/features/protecting_1208/pharmaceuticals.html

So, good people reading this, please do if at all possible consider–within the laws that govern your region–recycling the pills through charity hospitals; or if you can’t get constituted authorities to address the needs in indigent patients, put the dang pills in the trash with the kitty litter and something nasty. 

High-end painkillers are a must-have in every zombie apocalypse kit. You don’t know what will happen; stuff you have you can choose to not use, while you can’t choose to use something you don’t have on-hand. So until there are molecular assemblers on every desktop, the imperative is “keep it”. (If it is a solid form, keep it vacuum-packed in a freezer; due to the Arrhenius law it will slow down the degradation very significantly, keeping the things effective way past the expiration date.)

Shit happens. Be prepared.

These may be podunk cops, but NYPD just got slapped down today for their practice of rousting random non-white people on bogus trespass investigations.

I suppose that quite a few drugs abandoned in that situation get misused.

sounds like dirty cops with someone from 911 tipping them off whenever someone dies.  either that or callous idiots.  either way they deserve to be reprimanded.

he says officers insisted he help them look for the drugs

Fifth amendment says I don’t have to talk to you. Thirteenth amendment says I don’t work for you.

You need to have what I would consider pretty weird beliefs in order to care about this.

You seem to be using an awfully variant definition of ‘weird’.

The actions of the police in this case are unconscionable – fun fact to keep in mind – Opiates can be flushed down the toilet without fear of polluting the water.  Alternatively you can destroy them (and any other med) by mixing it with bleach and kitty litter or coffee grounds (do this outdoors or by an open window, it’s an exothermic reaction in the case of opiates!)

I’m pretty sure my grandmother just returned the leftover emergency painkillers/sedatives to the hospice organization, which had procured them in the first place (and to whom we had to report when my grandfather used any of the meds).

 http://www.dec.ny.gov/chemical/45083.html

But we’ve kept the dog ends of some of the lower grade stuff (T3s) and that turned out to be useful more than once.

The percocets went straight down the toilet once I was done with them though (shudder)