Rochester, NY may not be the focal point of the state’s largest drug rings, but residents are frequently seeing news headlines in which drugs were at the heart of, or at least played a role in, a dangerous criminal offense.

A 33-year-old man was arrested for selling drugs on Warsaw School property as far back as the fall of 2013. A 36-year-old woman in Victor is now dealing with authorities after she ran off a road in Farmington, hitting several street signs in the process, because she had taken prescription pills, had been drinking and was talking on her cell phone while driving — all with an eight-year-old child in the back seat. And not too far away in Syracuse, authorities took down two major drug rings that had been operating in central NYS; over $1 million in cocaine and heroin, $100,000 in cash, and an unspecified amount of prescription pills and guns were confiscated during the bust.

Rochester crimes involving hard street drugs have always been difficult for law enforcement to eradicate; in the case of busting a drug ring, for example, an investigation could take years before the organizations’ “kingpins” are caught. But where prescription drugs are concerned, state officials seem optimistic that they’ll be able to bring illegal drug use under control.

The state of New York already has the I-STOP program in place, which monitors the (legal) sales of certain drugs to ensure that these prescriptions are not being abused or sold. Opiates, in particular, are notorious for being abused and causing millions of deaths in the U.S. each year. Online pharmacies are another source of illegal drug use; these websites rarely regulate sales, they often sell placebos or different medications in lieu of what was ordered, and the majority of these websites aren’t approved by the FDA.

The problem with prescription drugs, as Oswego Chief of Police Karen Vinti states, is that unused prescriptions tend to sit, forgotten, in medicine cabinets, and those cabinets are one of the first places a burglar will check upon breaking into a home. The federal Controlled Substances Act prohibited patients from surrendering unused medications to medical centers, except on certain days. Rather than promote a safer environment, however, this regulation simply allowed more drugs to sit around in medicine cabinets and fall into the wrong hands.

But on October 9th, the DEA lifted this ruling, and pharmacies are now allowed to collect unused and unwanted prescription drugs at any time. One local news source refers to this change as “a huge step forward.” A representative for the Upstate Poison Control Center states that although there is still a lot of ground to cover in order to contain prescription drug abuse, this is an important first step.