By Jessica Pierce, Opinions Editor

“Bring your drugs to the football game!”

Most Reynolds High School students got this message Tuesday night from the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools system encouraging students and parents to bring old, unwanted or unused prescription medication to the football game Friday night. This event is sponsored by the school system and the Winston-Salem Police Department. Once all the expired medication has been collected, it will be taken to evidence management at the police department, where it will be destroyed on a future date.

Those attending the West Forsyth at Reynolds game at Deaton-Thompson Stadium can bring any prescription or over-the-counter medication.

The event is designed to help make students and others in the community aware of the danger that expired medication can have. Most medication is time-released, meaning that every hour a certain dosage of the drug is released into the body. Expired medication still contains some of the active ingredients, so taking it after the expiration date can lead to a change in the effectiveness, or efficacy, of the drug. In some cases the drug may not be released as fast as it should, and other times the drug can be released into the body too quickly.

Prescription drug abuse is something that a lot of people may not be that aware of. In a 2010 study done by the U.S. Department for Health & Human Services, 10.1 percent of teenagers (aged 12-17) labeled themselves as current “illicit drug users,” and 3 percent of those teens were taking prescription medication that was not prescribed by a doctor.

“I think people know about (prescription drugs), but don’t realize the harmful effects if it ends up in the wrong hands,” said Shena Nelson, Reynolds’ student resource officer.

Not only do out-of-date prescription drugs have the potential to harm people, they can also harm fish and other aquatic organisms. When a drug is flushed down the toilet, it enters a waste treatment plant, where the drug cannot always be removed from the water before it is washed back into rivers. This has been shown to cause deformities in fish and other animals. Simply throwing away your old medication can also lead to dangerous exposure to wild life or humans.

The best method to get rid of old medication is to crush it up and seal it in a plastic bag or take it to collection sites like the one at the Reynolds football game – and elsewhere in this community-wide event – Friday night.