Don Helme: Well, if we watch the news, we can see that the opioid epidemic is huge.
This project is focusing on Appalachia and rural areas specifically, but it's a nation-wide issue.
Every year, something like 3.9 billion controlled substances are prescribed.
Many of them opioids.
Over 70 percent of those go unused.
That's left over medicine that is then available to, unfortunately, hit a secondary market.
Or to be stolen out of people's homes or people's medicine cabinets.
Proper disposal hopefully can cut into that 70 percent.
As it stands now, in terms of existing disposal program really only account for 0.2 percent
of all of those opioids that are prescribed and unused.
Point 2 percent.
So, it's not even a drop in the bucket in terms of we get back from take back events
and from these disposal boxes.
Narrator: UK’s Don Helme and Wake Forest’s Mark Wolfson are conducting focus groups in
three counties in Kentucky and two in North Carolina.
They’re focusing on strategies to raise awareness and increase use of drug disposal
boxes and take-back events.
Don Helme: Every county in the state has a disposal facility for unused medications,
that people can go by, drop them off, get rid of them.
One of the issues is that they tend to be located, for security reasons, at the sheriff's
office or the police department.
Some of our focus group data that's coming out of the current project, that's one of
the main themes that's coming up.
Most folks are like, wait, we have what in this county?
I didn't know that existed.
And then when they hear the location, they're like, yeah...
I'm not going to stop by there and drop these off.
Because they don't want to get on the police force's radar or the sheriff's radar, so to speak.
And they don't want people seeing them dropping them off, because there's a security issue.
Some of the folks in our focus groups have mentioned that if somebody knows you're going
into surgery, they think you're going to get prescribed pain pills, you're going to get broken into.
They said it's a fact.
And that's disturbing and surprising, and these folks are afraid.
Some of it's cultural, why people hold on to these.
There's a culture in a lot of rural areas, and other places as well, of save it in case you need it.
Because prescriptions are expensive.
And I understand that.
This might be Vicodin, or Lortab, or Oxycontin or hydrocodone.
Those can become a security issue.
Part of what we're hoping to accomplish with our project is to encourage people to
take advantage of the existing disposal facilities.
And to, you know, make folks feel that it's a safe thing to do.
That they can get rid of these, and they don't, you know, have to be afraid
Narrator: The project expanded to include a drug deactivation pouch called deterra, when
the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office reached out to Dr. Helme.
Don Helme: Mr. Beshear's office reached out to us after they saw an article in UKNOW about
the CCTS funded project that Mark Wolfson at Wake Forest School of Medicine and I had received.
And they were interested, because they also saw that we were working in Floyd County separate
from what they were doing, in partnership to look at promoting proper disposal, of unused
prescription medications.
They told us about the Deterra package project that they have going, where they've received
funding, and are distributing 50,000 Deterra packages to four counties in Kentucky; Floyd,
Henderson, McCracken, and Perry.
And what a Deterra package is, kind of looks like a padded envelope where you can pour
in a bottle of unused medicine, pour in a little bit of water, seal it up, and in like
30 seconds to a minute, it's chemically rendered inert.
So it's completely deactivated, and you can throw it in the trash.
It's also biodegradable and non-toxic at that point.
Since they're distributing some of these packages in Floyd County, they wanted us to talk to
the folks down there as part of our project to see what do people think about these Deterra
packages, how is it being received, are people using them, where can they get them, are they
easy to get?
So, that's one of the things that we're going to be doing in partnership with Mr. Beshear's
office, basically gauging the receptivity of Deterra in the county.
As researchers here at UK, we're often interested in, from not just an academic sense, but for
myself, as a health communication researcher, how to improve lives.
While we can study that from an academic sense and from a scientific sense, we're not
the ones that make policy.
We can't flip the switch and make something into a law.
The state can.
So it's important for us to partner with the state when it's appropriate and when it's
possible, because our data, our evidence that we find from our scientific studies can, ideally,
provide the state with information it needs to make good decisions in terms of, in this
case, how specifically we can tackle this opioid crisis.