Officer Steven Summers keeps a look-out as Heather Camoza, evidence specialist, empties a box full of prescription medicine into a large paper bag held by Rose Kent, Police Records Tech and Evidence Assistant, Monday afternoon in downtown Centralia.
A prescription drug and unwanted medication box sits outside the Centralia police department in this 2018 file photo.
A prescription drug and unwanted medication box sits outside the Centralia police department Monday afternoon in downtown Centralia.
Lewis County commissioners scrapped a plan Monday that would have required drug companies to create a secure medicine return program in the county, citing additional feedback they’d received about a similar pending statewide mandate.
The proposed county ordinance came after the state Legislature passed a bill requiring a statewide take-back program starting in 2020. That bill also stipulated that county-specific programs needed to be in place by June 6 of this year in order to be phased into that effort.
County officials took that as a go-ahead to put a Lewis County mandate in place, but were contacted by Sen. John Braun, R-Centralia, who said that was not the intent of the bill.
“We didn't realize that our legislators felt like this was a negotiation in good faith,” said Public Health and Social Services Director Danette York.
In essence, pharmaceutical companies worked with legislators on the statewide plan, with the goal of avoiding county-by-county return mandates. Lewis County would have become the seventh to require such a program.
“Now there’s six different counties that are doing it six different ways,” said Commissioner Edna Fund. “The drug folks are not happy about it, because they were assured that when this was passed and becoming law in 2020, that it would be just one big group doing things the same way.”
Although Lewis County still had the legal standing to put its own program in place, officials opted to respect the work of the Legislature and not undermine the assurances lawmakers gave when getting drug companies on board. Instead, the county will wait for the statewide program to be phased in.
“Part of those negotiations were that [drug companies] agreed to do this in the hope that they wouldn't have to do it for each individual county,” said York. “They were asking us not to do that, because it was just going to cause them more work.”
