For the first time in Connecticut, opiate disposal pouches will be widely available for anyone with leftover prescription drugs in their medicine cabinets.
Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals donated 80,000 of the pouches to more than 600 pharmacies around the state and they are available to customers, free of charge.
The hope for state officials is that people take advantage of them to help curb the spread of heroin-based opioids, which will be responsible for more than 900 deaths in 2016 in Connecticut.
"This is brilliant, whoever came up with this. Absolutely, it’s going to save a lot of lives," said Sue Kruzcek, who lost her 20-year-old son, Nick, to an opioid overdose.
The governor and medical officials have said the face of opiate addiction has changed as a result of powerful prescription painkillers that are prescribed every day.
That's a point Gov. Dannel Malloy attempted to make Thursday.
“This is not the opioids that people like me grew up with where the opioid was very unpure," he told the crowd at Saint Francis Hospital in Hartford.
Local
“Folks, the reason this thing got so far out of hand is nobody understood it. This is not heroin addiction of the 50s, the 60s the 70s, the 80s, or even the 90s. This is entirely different. It looks a lot cleaner but it’s more deadly.”
The pouches are simple to use. They have a plastic zipping seal and a charcoal-based chemical mix inside. The user simply needs to pour as many as 45 pills into the bag and follow that with warm water. The mixture will dissolve and dilute the opiate, making it safe once the pouch is discarded in the trash.
More than one million of the pouches have been distributed nationwide.
