BAY MINETTE, Ala. — Local residents faced with stockpiles of outdated or no-longer-needed prescription medications can dispose of the substances safely April 30 at North Baldwin Pharmacy.

Building on the momentum of a successful 2010 campaign, the national “Take Back Initiative” for 2011 is designed to curb the reselling of prescription drugs, and the Bay Minette Police Department has again joined forces with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to host the event.

“It’s really a no-questions-asked sort of thing,” said pharmacist Blaine Chastain.

Chastain’s North Baldwin Pharmacy and the CVS on McMeans Avenue teamed up in September to help the police department collect prescriptions with a combined street value of about $2,000.

Nationally, the initiative collected more than 242,000 pounds of prescription medications at 4,094 collection sites in all 50 states. According to a news release from the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control, nearly 3,000 state and local law enforcement agencies participated in the program.

“(The police) don’t ask how you got the prescriptions, and they don’t want to know. Just drop them off, and they’ll be locked up and destroyed, so nobody has to worry about personal information getting released or anything like that,” Chastain said. “A lot of people just don’t know what to do with them, especially if they’ve had a family member pass away and they’ve got a medicine cabinet full. This is primarily to be sure children don’t have access to things that could be harmful to them, no matter how you came by them.”

According to the 2009 Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health, more than 7 million people nationwide abuse prescription drugs, and an average of 2,500 teenagers per day use them as their first encounter with drugs.

Bay Minette Police Chief Mike Rowland said the initiative is designed to “minimize the possibility of somebody getting those drugs and misusing them in some way.”

“The majority of drugs that are accessible to especially young people, school-aged kids, is in their own home in the medicine cabinet,” Rowland said in a previous interview. “There is a tremendous amount of people out there who have prescriptions that are outdated or never used.”

The prescriptions collected will be turned over to the DEA for destruction, he said.

The 2011 ‘Take Back’ day will last from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. April 30.