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It is traditional to expect that consumers get prescription drugs from a pharmacy and that the pharmacy got their drugs from a trusted source, such as manufacturer or wholesaler. [1] In a drug recycling program, consumers would access drugs through a less standardized supply chain. Consequently, concerns of the quality of the recycled drugs arise.
Drug disposal is the discarding of drugs. Individuals commonly dispose of unused drugs that remain after the end of medical treatment. [ 1 ] Health care organizations dispose of drugs on a larger scale for a range of reasons, including having leftover drugs after treating patients and discarding of expired drugs.
An unused drug or leftover drug is the medicine which remains after the consumer has quit using it. Individual patients may have leftover medicines at the end of their treatment. Health care organizations may keep larger amounts of drugs as part of providing care to a community, and may have unused drugs for a range of reasons.
The most environmentally safe disposal method is to take advantage of community drug take-back programs that collect drugs at a central location for proper disposal. Several local public health departments in the United States have initiated these programs.
Drug take-back programs are a common and environmentally supportive method for avoiding the improper disposal of unused pharmaceuticals. [2] One of the objectives of the program is to avoid disposal of drugs by flushing them to the local sewage system, which causes water pollution .
Antineoplastic drugs are employed during chemotherapy all over the world. They pollute water courses and have 'mutagenic, cytostatic, and ecotoxicological effects on the micro-organisms that are in the aquatic environment.' The wastewater treatment process is not able to remove antineoplastic drugs due to the intractable nature of them.
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For many drugs that undergo this process, lower doses of drugs can be therapeutically effective because elimination is reduced by the 'recycling' of the drug. But for a small number of drugs that are very toxic to the intestine (e.g. irinotecan ), these molecules which would not otherwise be very toxic can become so because of this process, and ...