Photo by Jacob Perryman The prescription drug drop-off box at the Youngsville Borough Building.

It’s National Prescription Drug Take-back Day and Warren County is doing its part.

Youngsville Borough Police Department Chief Todd Mineweaser, who heads the program for the county, said the borough has been participating in the program since 2010. Since then, Conewango Township, the City of Warren and the county sheriff’s office have joined together to collect expired or unneeded prescription drugs for disposal.

“It’s one of the better programs we do in the county for our seniors,” he said. “You’ll never be able to tell how many people we’ve helped – how many break-ins and robberies it may have prevented. You can’t measure the success.”

Participating agencies don’t just collect prescriptions on official take-back days, it’s a year-round service offered through drop off locations around the county.

“People deliver them all year,” Mineweaser said.

This afternoon, prescriptions will be collected from drop-boxes around the county and delivered to Erie for proper disposal.

And it’s grown to be a lot of prescriptions.

According to Mineweaser, in the first year of the program, only 21 pounds of prescriptions were disposed of. Since then, it’s increased to hundreds of pounds per year, peaking at 553 pounds in 2015.

“There’s up and down years,” he said. “Last year was one of the lowest.”

In that “low” year, the program still collected 160 pounds of prescriptions.

The Pennsylvania Drug Enforcement Agency manages the program statewide “with the goal of fighting prescription drug misuse by creating convenient ways to dispose of medication that would otherwise be at risk of misuse in home medicine cabinets,” according to a state release on the event.

According to the DEA, the last statewide event in April collected more than 29,000 pounds of prescriptions statewide. Since the program’s inception in 2010, more than 1.2 million pounds have been collected and disposed of.