Are We Supposed to Recycle Medicine?

Over the years and after every visit to a doctor when I get ill, or simply a visit to Boots in the UK, I’ve acquired a great and big collection of different forms of medicine. Tablets, capsules, syrups, drops, ointments, bandages, antiseptics, vitamins, antibiotics, etc. As a result I now have an actual handbag filled to the brim with my pharmaceutical loot and use them within realistic limits of their expiration date. I won’t be throwing out a good antibiotic just because it expired on January 2013 now am I?

But then I also have a lot of medicine that expired eons ago. The oldest take back to the early 2000′s and I think I’ve been in denial about reaching the third half of the second decade of the new millennium but I’ve finally decided that a medicine made in 2001 is now 12-years-old and consuming it might very well turn me into a mutant or something. It had to go, but many do still reside there.

I was just wondering if there is anyway we can “recycle” medicine? Instead of throwing it out, perhaps someone out there, a chemist or a pharmacist perhaps, would actually make use of the substances in the medicine even if they are no longer OK to be consumed by humans?

Are we supposed to recycle medicine? If we are, how and where and when exactly? Do you have any idea?

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