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Abstract
To determine how parents dispose of unused prescription medications and correlates of disposal, we recruited 3,043 parents of adolescents to complete a survey. Multivariate and multinomial logistic regression was conducted to examine correlates of disposal of prescription medication. Only 17.8% of parents in a household prescribed a controlled medication in the past year disposed of unused medications. Of those, 36.7% used organized disposal (e.g., take-back event or drop box) and 63.3% disposed of medications at home. Organized disposal was associated with awareness of disposal opportunities. Increasing awareness of organized disposal opportunities is a promising mechanism to increase their use by parents.
Additional information
Funding
Research reported in this article was supported by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration under SP019436 and the NIDA T32 training grant at the UF Substance Abuse Training Center in Public Health from the National Institutes of Health (T32DA035167). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not represent the official views of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration or the National Institutes of Health. This work was supported by National Institute on Drug Abuse.