GULF SHORES, Ala. – For the second year in a row the Gulf Shores Police Department will have a prescription drug drop-off day in conjunction with the Drug Enforcement Agency.

On April 28 from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. residents can drop off outdated prescription drugs at the Walgreens in Gulf Shores.

But the event will also mark the beginning of a year-round effort to have prescription drugs disposed of properly in the city.

A project Community Resource Officer Josh Coleman has been working on is having a permanent box for residents to discard old medicines.

“One of the things that I’m working on is called the prescription drop box. It will actually be housed in the lobby of the police department,” he said. “It’s a way to stop pharmaceutical drugs from being flushed and ultimately getting in the water stream.”

That is the goal of the effort, keeping drugs out of drinking water.

“When it goes down into the water stream and breaks down the filtration systems we have nationwide cannot filter out all the stuff,” Coleman said. “If it’s just a miniscule amount of prescription medications that don’t get filtered out, you don’t know what’s going to happen when it comes back up.”

Coleman says the DEA does a lot of monitoring of the manufacture and distribution of prescription drugs, but once they are in the hands of consumers, they have no way to track them.

“It’s like a car, after it goes off the lot, everything changes,” he said. “When the prescription goes out of the door at Walgreen’s, Walmart, CVS, there’s no tracking for it anymore. So the DEA set up these one-day take back events.”

Gulf Shores participated in the same one-day event last year.

“We took in 11 pounds of pharmaceuticals,” Coleman said.

Coleman said citizens can bring in any outdated drugs for disposal with no questions asked.

“We ask that you take your label off the bottle because then you’ll know it’s 100 percent anonymous,” he said. “Some people don’t, but we don’t look at it, we don’t keep any track of it. Box it up, list that it’s various pharmaceutical drugs to be disposed by EDEA and they come and pick it up and they take it to the incinerator.”

Coleman says the one-day event will be a chance to showcase the department’s full-time drop box.

“My program, instead of it being one day, we’ll have a full-time box,” he said. “The U.S. Postal Service was kind enough to donate a box to us. We repainted it so it’s not confused with mail and we put our patch on it.

“I want to showcase that when we do our one-day event. DEA is doing a one day event so I don’t want to take anything away from that and Gulf Shores PD is going to have a full-time site from here on out.”