Household Medication Disposal

Below are some helpful notes on the terminology used on our webpages:

• Drug? Medicine? Medication? Pharmaceutical? You may notice different terms are used in different contexts and by different organizations. On these webpages, we use these terms interchangeably.
• Unwanted Medicine. A medicine may become unwanted - and then a waste - for many reasons: it expired; it wasn’t tolerated; it didn’t work; the patient didn’t need it anymore; etc.
• Active pharmaceutical ingredient. A substance that is incorporated into a finished drug product that performs the function of the drug product (as opposed to an inactive ingredient). API is a term that is more likely to appear in scientific literature.