VALPARAISO | Teens are gathering up unused prescription pills from their parents' and grandparents' homes and are taking them to school so they and their friends can get a buzz, police say.
When school lets out, some students have pharmaceutic or "pharming" parties -- where everybody's pills get tossed in a big bowl and then everybody grabs some random pills to ingest, according to police.
The problem has gotten so bad that pill-related arrests -- which totalled a dozen in the Valparaiso schools since Jan. 1 -- have outpaced marijuana arrests, said Valparaiso police Sgt. Steve Jackson, school resource officer.
That's why Jackson is on a mission to educate parents to properly dispose of old medicine and to better secure current prescriptions.
Jackson is inviting community members to bring unwanted prescription or over-the-counter medicines to the Valparaiso police station, at 355 S. Washington St., from 7 to 10 a.m. Monday and Tuesday. People who bring in medicine will receive coupons for free items at local businesses.
Jackson said everything that is collected will be incinerated. He is encouraging people not to flush pills down the toilet because they can end up in the water system, and he said pills tossed in the garbage can be found and used.
If people are unable to bring their pills to the police station, the Porter County Recycling & Waste Reduction District said Pharma-Card Pharmacy locations on Lute Road in Portage and Roosevelt Road in Valparaiso, and Fagen Pharmacy on U.S. 6 in South Haven, accept pills year round.
The district is also having a collection date 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, May 10 at the Porter County Expo Center.
Jackson said young people think pills are safe because they were at one time prescribed to someone by a doctor. But prescription drugs are contributing to more fatal drug overdoses in Porter County than street drugs like heroin, cocaine, ecstasy and methamphetamine, according to the Porter County Coroner's Office.
Coroner's statistics show that in 2006, 16 people died of overdoses in which prescription drugs were a factor.
Jackson said young people also don't realize the penalties they could face if caught with pills at school. Delivering the attention-deficit disorder drug Adderall at school is a Class A felony, punishable by up to 50 years in prison.
Jackson has seen pills surfacing as early as the seventh grade in middle schools.
Police Sgt. Michael Grennes said the whole point of the upcoming pill collection campaign is to make people think about an issue they might not have thought about, and to get them to turn in unused medicine and better secure their current prescriptions.
