Look y'all... This Saturday, April 25th, is National Prescription Drug Take Back Day, an event organized by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). It’s the 30th one, in fact (events are ~2/year). And if you’re one of the +4,000 communities that participates, great. It’s not a bad idea to remind people to clean out their medicine cabinets. Getting unused and expired prescriptions out of the home is a reasonable public health practice. We support safe drug disposal.
But we will call out when communities spend opioid settlement dollars on a program that mostly collects expired blood pressure meds, while people are still dying from the unpredictable and unregulated drug supply.
Yes, you read that right.
Communities are spending opioid settlement money to host, promote, and staff events for a program that operated just fine without settlement dollars…oh, and the medications collected are overwhelmingly not opioids. And you can just flush opioids down the toilet anyway. If this sounds familiar...yes, it's basically the same problem we pointed out with Deterra and other drug disposal pouches.
Antonella Peterson
What are we doing, y’all? This is like paying for a car wash when it’s raining outside.
Quick WFAM Project Updates (04.22.2026)
Our database is at 694 WFAM examples
📈 +45 WFAM examples since last post
Current WFAM Total: ~$40.1 mil
📈 +$0.9mil since last post
DEA Take Back Day 🚯
Today, we’re calling out spending opioid settlement money on drug take-back events:
Drug Take Back Day Events (+$76,112)
- Where: California, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New York
- Initial Spending: Event materials (pamphlets, signs, etc), staff time
- Unallowable spending in: N/A
- AKA: DEA Drug Take Back Day, National Prescription Take Back Day, National Take Back Initiative
Background
Let’s start with what DEA Take Back Day actually is.