Whether we are prescribed too many or the box contains more tablets than necessary, we often come out of the pharmacy with an overflow of medication. So many boxes that accumulate over the months or years.
A sorting is then necessary: in addition to the lack of space in your medicine cabinet, keeping all these drugs after the end of the dosage represents a significant health risk.
How to sort efficiently?
Completely empty your medicine cabinet in order to examine each box of medicine: is it a medicine that you use frequently or prescribed for a specific situation? Do you remember exactly why it was prescribed to you? Each medical prescription corresponding to a diagnosis for a person in a specific situation, it is in fact inadvisable to use medication prescribed for another person, even when the circumstances or the symptoms seem similar to you.
Take the opportunity to check that you still have the instructions in order to follow the instructions: dosage and duration of treatment. Otherwise, the drug should be discarded because, for lack of instructions, you will not be able to consult the side effects and check the contraindications such as allergies, age, the presence of other diseases…
Of course, it is also and above all an opportunity to check the expiry date. An expired drug loses its effectiveness and may see its tolerance modified.
Finally, when storing medicines that are still useful and suitable for consumption, remember to separate pediatric medicines from those for adults.
What to do with unused medication?
If the first reflex to make room may be to get rid of discarded medicines – whether they are expired or not used because prescribed in the context of a very specific pathology – by simply throwing them in the trash, this gesture is on the contrary to be avoided. “The drug is not a product like any other, it contains active substances which can constitute a source of risk for the patient, his relatives and the environment. When it is thrown in the trash or in a sink, it can pollute the soil and water,” warns Vincent Cotard, president of NèreS.
Rather than throwing them away, bring them back to your pharmacist who will collect them as part of the Cyclamed device. Since 2007, all pharmacies, in mainland France and overseas, have had the obligation to recover unused medicines, for human use, brought back by individuals. A BVA study for Cyclamed
reports that 9,953 tonnes of unused medicines were thus collected in 2020 via community pharmacies and wholesale distributors thanks to French households.
Bring them back, yes, but without the cardboard boxes
If this reflex is acquired for a majority of French people (86%), only 54% of them think about removing medicines from their cardboard packaging before returning them. Yes, they must be removed beforehand as well as the paper instructions because these can be thrown in the recyclable waste bin at home.
If there are any tablets left on the pack, leave them there: the entire contents and container are collected by the pharmacy. This instruction is also valid for oral or non-oral solutions, ointments, sprays, inhalers, eye drops, etc.
As for hazardous waste, used syringes or needles, they must be placed in a secure and inviolable box. This is normally provided by the pharmacist when dispensing the drug.
* BVA study for Cyclamed conducted with a representative sample of 2,364 individuals spread over all regions.
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