The Buchanan County Sheriff’s Office is working to establish a permanent prescription drug dropbox program.

Discussions on crime trends in the area tend to begin with talking about the opioid crisis. That’s according to Buchanan County Sheriff Bill Puett, who said the crime side is just one side of the effects of drug abuse.

“The opioid issue is going to be something that has to be addressed, not only by the law enforcement… but in public health and the legislature and various other avenues. It’s not just a law enforcement issue, it’s an issue that’s affecting our community that has to be approached from all angles,” Puett said. “If you have information please call us. We have the TIPS Hotline, we have various avenues for people to give us information and the more information we can get, the more effective we can be in the enforcement strategies whether it’s us, the police department, Highway Patrol.”

One of the ways to help combat prescription drug abuse can be through prescription take back programs. A take back day is held twice a year in St. Joseph, but Puett said an idea in the works for awhile has been a dropbox program where people can dispose of unwanted or expired prescription drugs anytime.

“It may be in the lobby of the Law Enforcement Center so it can be secured… but we are going to, in the future, have a dropbox someplace so, year-round, folks can come and drop off those pills and things… they’ve had in their cabinets or whatever and we’ll deal with those,” Puett said. “This way, it takes more and more off the street, it makes it less available and that type of stuff that has the potential for abuse if it’s not handled correctly so, it’s just another way of trying to whittle away at the problems. We’ll have to have a structure made… but it will be a very small cost for a very large gain.”

Puett said they are looking into ways to safely dispose of prescription drugs and they hope to have the dropbox program set up soon.