The Clanton Police Department will participate in the Drug Enforcement Administration Office of Diversion Control Prescription Drug Take-Back Program on Saturday from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. in the Goose Pond Park parking lot.

CPD Narcotics detectives will be set up to take all unused, unneeded, unwanted and expired prescription drug medication with no questions asked.

“We participated in this program last year and took in two boxes of unused prescription medication that amounted to over 10 pounds,” CPD Chief Brian Stilwell said.

The program’s purpose is to get unused prescription drugs off the street in order to keep them out of the wrong hands.

“We are finding prescription drug abuse on the rise in Clanton, and we’ll do anything we can do to get these unused drugs off the street,” Stilwell said.

The take-back program is a safe way to have these medicines destroyed. They will be picked up by DEA and disposed of properly.

For more information, call CPD detectives at 755-1194 extension 319, or visit www.dea.gov.

Attorney General Luther Strange, U.S. Attorney George L. Beck Jr. and DEA Assistant Special Agent in Charge for Alabama Clay Morris held a news conference Friday urging Alabamians to participate in the program, which will be held at locations throughout the state.

Strange and U.S. Beck led efforts earlier this year to strengthen and expand Alabama’s participation in this recurring effort by law enforcement to promote the safe disposal of prescription drugs. The most recent Prescription Drug-Take Back events last spring were Alabama’s most successful ever, with more than 50 agencies sponsoring more than 70 collection sites and collecting more than 4,000 pounds of prescription drugs to be properly destroyed.

The Prescription Drug Take-Back program is sponsored nationally by the DEA to combat the abuse or misuse of potentially dangerous medicines that have expired or are no longer needed by those for whom these controlled substances were prescribed.

The Alabama Department of Public Health has cited prescription drug abuse as an emerging public health issue and the nation’s fastest-growing drug problem. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2008, most of the deaths in the U.S. that were due to drug overdoses were caused by prescription drugs. In Alabama, the rate of prescription painkillers sold per 10,000 people in 2010 was among the highest in the nation.

Many teenagers and young people who abuse prescription drugs get them from family and friends or from their home medicine cabinets.