Excelsior Springs employee exposed to cyanide, arsenic left in drug disposal box
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EXCELSIOR SPRINGS, Missouri (KCTV) — A local police chief is rethinking the relative risks of providing a drug take-back box in its lobby after one of his investigators was exposed to arsenic and cyanide left in the box.
It happened on Friday when the investigator was emptying out the drop box, intended for people to dispose of outdated, unused or unwanted prescription medications. Typically, he would find the plastic, orange pill bottles you get from a pharmacy nowadays. This time, he noticed several small, vintage glass bottles. One had broken and was in pieces. Almost immediately, before he could read the labels, he began sweating and then threw up. An ambulance came. HazMat gear was involved. Then, police got a closer look at the labels.
“One of them was mercury cyanide,” said Excelsior Springs Police Chief Greg Dull. “The other one was arsenic, actually said poison on the bottle.”
He said the investigator did not need to go to the hospital. He had persistent headaches for two days after the exposure, Dull said. but is now doing fine.
Once it was clear the investigator would be okay, the poison control toxicologist shared amazement. Dull paraphrased her remarks.
“I can tell you this because you are police officers,” Dull recounted, “but in my line of work, this is kind of exciting because you don’t see this stuff very often. She goes, ‘Nobody has seen this kind of stuff in 50 years.’”
Police posted about it on Facebook on Tuesday. Their fears of malicious intent were calmed when they got a comment from the Excelsior Springs Museum and Archive saying it was an accident.
“She was very apologetic,” Dull said.
A woman told Dull the bottles came from an old pharmacy but had no unique historical significance to Excelsior Springs, so they got rid of them. She said she asked someone at the police department if she could put them in the box and was given the OK. Dull said there had to be some kind of miscommunication.
The bottles and the box are now with the DEA. The chief said they might not get a new one. He noted their lobby is not supervised. This time it was an innocent mistake and the poisoning was not fatal, but he’s now worried about a next time.
“It honestly has made me reevaluate whether or not this is the appropriate place to have one of these bins,” Dull said on Wednesday. “I know it’s a service to the community, that there’s a lot of older people in town that don’t have any transportation to be able to go someplace else to drop those things off, but we’re in a facility that’s not always occupied where we can kind of screen who’s bringing in and what they’re bringing in.”
In the interim, the department is referring people to similar boxes that remain open at the Lawson Police Department, Liberty Hospital, Children’s Mercy North Campus, Kansas City Police Department patrol divisions, and several pharmacies.
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