This act, sponsored by Louise Slaughter D-NY,  directs the Attorney General to establish a stewardship program to facilitate the collection and disposal of prescription medication. The apparent aim of this act and similar legislation that has been proposed in a number of states is to provide a way for people to safely dispose of unused medications (particularly abusable drugs such as opiates) and protect groundwater from pharmaceutical wastes.

The bill authorizes the Attorney General to assess and collect fees from producers of prescription medications to pay for the costs of the program. The direction for the amount of fees is simply that it “... provides for a fair and reasonable allocation of the costs of carrying out this section...”

This seems more than a little vague. Would the fees be based simply on some metric such as the total number of units sold per year? Would some producers (such as manufacturers of opioids) be charged a greater fee per unit? We reached out to the Congresswoman's office for clarification, but we have not received a response.

This type of requirement, known as Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR)*, has counterparts in a number of states. You can see a list of states with similar proposed legislation here: https://nsaction.us/policy-and-legislation/. The state legislation appears to have been sponsored by roughly the same number of Democrats and Republicans.

Properly disposing of unused medication is definitely of great benefit. It can help prevent narcotics abuse and it can help keep pharmaceuticals out of our water supply. It will be interesting to see how pharmaceutical manufacturers react to the legislation. If passed, it will also be interesting to see how it is implemented.

You can find the full text of the bill here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/4199/text


* Extended Producer Responsibility  is a strategy designed to promote the integration of environmental costs associated with goods throughout their life cycles into the market price of the products. It was introduced in Sweden in 1990 by Thomas Lindhqvist. The idea is to reduce the total impact of a product on the environment by making a manufacturer responsible for the entire life-cycle of the product – particularly final disposal.