Drugs pile up; incinerator can't take them

Cocaine and other illegal drugs are stacking up in police evidence rooms across Washington because Spokane's garbage incinerator has been forced to stop accepting the stuff.

"This is a big hazard to my mind. ... It's a huge, huge target for theft," said Joe Latta, executive director of the California-based International Association for Property and Evidence.

As Washington's last remaining municipal trash incinerator, the Spokane plant was among the largest places in the state that could burn drugs, the state Department of Ecology said. Required by federal law to witness the destruction of illegal drugs they've confiscated, law agencies from the Palouse to the peninsula used to come to Spokane for the task.

Damon Taam, who heads the solid waste system, said the drugs amounted to about 20 tons of the 300,000 tons of trash burned at the incinerator each year.

"It's not a huge amount, and most of it's packaging," he said. "When you go through police property rooms, there are boxes within boxes and bags within bags."

The policy changed last March after Washington State University reviewed its practices and determined that the drugs it had been sending up the road met Washington's definition of hazardous waste. The Department of Ecology agreed and put an end to the practice.

The incinerator is not licensed for hazardous waste. So, it had to stop accepting drugs - other than marijuana - for incineration, Taam said.

Ecology Department spokeswoman Caitlin Cormier said the agency never intended to classify drugs as a hazardous waste.

The agency likely will change its rules to exempt drugs, Cormier said. But that will require public hearings and other procedures. She wasn't sure how long the process might take.

In the meantime, Washington cops are caught in the cross fire of state and federal regulations. The Drug Enforcement Administration says they must burn illegal drugs; the state says they can't burn them.

Ecology and law enforcement agencies have scrambled to find other disposal options.

One possible short-term solution would be shipping the confiscated illegal drugs to a waste-to-energy plant near Salem, Ore., Cormier said.

Staff for the Spokane city-county evidence room used to take drugs to the incinerator every couple of months, supervisor Donna Berroteran said.

"We really don't have the space to be storing all these drugs until they decide we can take them out there again," Berroteran said.

Latta said his nonprofit organization advises agencies to get rid of drug samples as soon as they're no longer needed for evidence.

California went through problems nearly identical to Washington's, and the state's 500 law-enforcement agencies were stuck with evidential drugs for two years. The state finally revised its policies, Latta said.

Latta said drugs were stolen from California evidence rooms during that period, although he couldn't say for certain that the unusually large accumulation led to the thefts.

"In California, you're talking a massive amount of narcotics. ... Billions of dollars (worth) of dope and no way to get rid of it," he said.

Berroteran said she's not worried about theft from the Spokane evidence room. The drugs are kept under lock and key.

Legal drugs can still be disposed of in Washington, although classifying them as hazardous waste has made the process more complicated.

More than 1,000 Washington pharmacies, hospitals, veterinarian clinics and other large drug users send their leftovers to PS Industries of Seattle, where owner Phil Schoeneman completes the required DEA paperwork and disposes of the pills.

Schoeneman, a pharmacist by training, used to drive a vanload of drugs to Spokane about every six weeks. He now uses a DEA-approved method for turning the drugs into hazardous waste - he wouldn't give details because he doesn't want his competitors to know the process - which then is disposed of at a specially designed landfill.

"It's a lot more expensive" than taking the drugs to an incinerator, said Schoeneman, who has had to raise the prices he charges clients.

WSU also is disposing of legal drugs by turning them into hazardous waste, said John Reed, the university's environmental services manager. It's done by mixing chemicals with the drugs; the exact recipe changes from one prescription to another, Reed said.

"It might take us two or three hours to treat a couple of containers," he said. "It's very labor-intensive."

Neither Sacred Heart nor Deaconess medical centers use the waste- to-energy plant for unused prescription drugs. The hospitals contract with private companies that return some expired drugs to manufacturers for rebates and dispose of the rest according to EPA guidelines.

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