Nassau County has a prescription drug problem, and it’s sitting in your medicine cabinet right now.
The Town of Oyster Bay and the Village of Massapequa Park are doing something about it. On Saturday, May 2, they’re hosting a “Shed the Meds” Drug Take Back Day at Massapequa Park Village Hall, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. The event is free, anonymous, and run in partnership with Drug Free Long Island and the Nassau County Police Department.
The back parking lot at Village Hall is the drop point. Three hours. No questions asked.
“This Drug Take Back Day is a great opportunity to rid your medicine cabinet of old and unwanted prescription drugs,” Oyster Bay Town Supervisor Joseph Saladino said. “Through proper disposal of old medications, we can prevent them from contaminating the environment through improper disposal and also keep them out of the wrong hands and away from young people.”
That last part deserves some attention. Prescription drug misuse among teenagers on Long Island didn’t start in a back alley. It starts at home, in the bathroom cabinet, with pills that were prescribed years ago and never finished. Unused prescription opioids are one of the most common gateways to addiction according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The pills sitting in your medicine cabinet since your knee surgery in 2023 aren’t just clutter. They’re a risk.
Saladino’s point about environmental contamination is real, too. Flushing old medications is the instinctive move for most people, but pharmaceuticals that enter the water supply don’t just disappear. They pass through wastewater treatment systems that weren’t built to filter them out. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has flagged pharmaceutical contamination as an ongoing concern for drinking water and aquatic ecosystems. Long Island’s water supply is already under enough stress from nitrogen runoff and legacy contamination. You don’t need to add leftover blood pressure medication to the list.
The logistics are straightforward. If you’re bringing medication in its original container, remove your personal information from the label first. Liquid medication won’t be accepted. Intravenous solutions, injectables, and syringes will be taken. Illicit substances are not part of the program, so don’t try it.
Simple enough.
For anyone who can’t make the May 2 date, Nassau County Police precincts across the county maintain permanent disposal containers for safe drop-off year-round. No event required. Drug Free Long Island, the nonprofit coordinating the Massapequa Park event, can be reached at (516) 639-2386 or at [email protected] for questions.
I’ve watched communities across this country lose people to pills that started as legitimate prescriptions. Covered enough funerals from the press box and outside it. The opioid crisis didn’t flatten out the way everyone hoped it would after the Purdue Pharma settlements and the OxyContin crackdown. It shifted. Fentanyl moved in and filled the vacuum, and it’s meaner and less forgiving than anything that came before. Getting old prescriptions out of circulation is a small move. Still counts.
Events like this one work best when people actually show up. Massapequa Park Village Hall is at the center of a dense, residential part of Nassau County. The families living within a mile of that parking lot almost certainly have something expired sitting in a bathroom cabinet somewhere. A three-hour window on a Saturday morning is not a serious obstacle.
The partnership structure here is worth noting, too. Oyster Bay and Massapequa Park working jointly with Drug Free Long Island and the Nassau County Police Department means there’s real institutional backing behind this. It’s not a folding table set up by volunteers. This is how these programs are supposed to run. The DEA’s National Prescription Drug Take Back Day model, which has collected millions of pounds of unused medication nationally since 2010, proved the concept. Local programs like this one extend the reach into specific communities on specific days.
The Long Island Press first reported the announcement on April 10.
May 2. Massapequa Park Village Hall back parking lot. Ten in the morning until one in the afternoon. Bring the pills. Leave them there. It takes fifteen minutes and costs nothing.