Michigan congressional candidate pushed to kill drug take back program
Paul Junge previously worked to stop the implementation of a program intended to prevent drugs from harming children and the environment.
Years before Paul Junge began his 2024 campaign to represent mid-Michigan in the U.S. House of Representatives, he pushed to prevent a safe disposal program for residents to discard harmful drugs in a California county.
Junge, a Grand Blanc Republican and former Trump administration official, is facing Michigan Senator Kristen McDonald Rivet, a Democrat from Bay City, in the November race for Michigan’s 8th Congressional District being vacated by retiring U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee.
The district is one of seven competitive open U.S. House races on the ballot this November, according to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. Of those races, the 8th Congressional District seat is one of two races considered a toss up — the other is the race between former state lawmakers Curtis Hertel Jr. and Tom Barrett for U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin’s seat in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District.
The opioid epidemic continues to affect individuals in Michigan and throughout the country, but Junge previously worked alongside pharmaceutical companies in opposing an ordinance to prevent drugs from harming children and the environment in California.
In 2012, the board of supervisors in Alameda County mulled a citizen-led ordinance that would require manufacturers of nonprescription and prescription drugs to implement a drug take back program for residents who wanted to safely dispose of their unwanted medication. Without passing costs down to residents, the program intended to alleviate drug abuse, prevent children from accessing unused medication in cabinets and reduce water contamination from prescription drugs being flushed in the toilet or thrown in the trash.
Then, as the Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce public policy director, Junge urged county officials at a March 2012 board meeting “to either oppose or delay consideration” of the ordinance. He said that safe disposal programs were unnecessary when residents could dispose of the drugs themselves and warned that local residents could lose access to their medications entirely if the ordinance passed.
“Part of the way these programs work is it causes an increase in the cost of the drugs. That won’t be good for anybody these days and again… I would just point out that there could be further unintended consequences,” he said.
A Junge campaign spokesperson did not respond to comment for this story.
The pushback from Junge and drug company lobbyists against the proposal stalled its passage for months. The board eventually unanimously passed a version of the ordinance with watered down language and the decision was ultimately upheld in the courts.
Alameda County became the first municipality in the country to implement this program. It was later updated in 2016 to re-add the requirement for nonprescription drugs. The county reported that the program collected over 350,000 pounds of unwanted medicine from 2015-2023.