I work as an administrator of a large surgery center. For the past couple of years, we have been running a “pharmacy” out of our office. I use quotations because the medication isn’t dispensed by a pharmacist on site but come to us prepackage and labeled for resale. The hope that this would increase revenue has been a dismal failure and has even lost us clients who ended up annoyed when they discovered they were paying more for the same drug that could be purchased at their local Walgreens for a quarter of the price.
Anyway, I’ve decided to shut it down completely. However, I am left with hundreds of bottles of prepackaged prescription drugs that need to be disposed of. There are companies that will take them and according to their website, dispose of them safely. But the idea of destroying hundreds of bottles of sealed medications when there are people in need of them and can’t afford them upsets me a great deal. I have left two message this week with volunteer health clinics run by local churches and no one has called me back. Perhaps there is a service that brings medication to third world countries? Isn’t there anyone that will take these drugs from me? Note: There are no controlled substances. They are mostly drugs that treat orthopaedic type ailments.
Find a local independently-owned pharmacy, or a franchise one, and sell them to that store. Has to be a store with an owner who knows what his profit is – a manager for a chain won’t do this, it’s probably ‘against corporate policy’.
You’ll only get wholesale price, but it’s better than nothing,
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I changed the thread title from “PLEASE take my drugs from me!” to “How do I find an organization that could use these pharmaceuticals?” to make it clearer what this thread is about.
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Businesses sell overstock goods to other businesses all the time. Since these are prescription drugs, they would have to be sold to another licensed pharmacy. But that would be OK.
When my uncle closed down his pharmacy, he sold off all the items at sale prices, except for his stock of drugs – those he sold to other druggists in nearby towns.
You might also try Heart to Heart International. Very reputable. They may be able to use them in their humanitarian work in disaster zones across the world.
Would it be too terrible to just give the meds to your facility’s patients as long as they’ve been prescribed by the surgeons? (And how much shelf life do they have left?) Your description of non-controlled, primarily post-op ortho meds has me envisioning things like 800mg ibuprofen, medrol or other multi-day steroid packs, muscle relaxants like robaxin or soma, etc. All are certainly life-improving meds, but probably not the exciting life-saving meds that would get the attention of humanitarian groups.