ST. LUCIE COUNTY — Standing at a conference table jammed with bottles, bags and boxes of pills, St. Lucie County Sheriff Ken Mascara called "Operation Safe Medicine Cabinet" a "huge success." The program was designed to allow people to safely discard old or unwanted medicines, preventing the drugs from getting in the wrong hands or contaminating rivers and lakes. More than 500 people dropped off about 100,000 pills -- everything from powerful painkillers to decades-old medicine -- during the event Saturday. The drugs will be incinerated. At a press conference Tuesday, Mascara noted that some of the pills could look like M&Ms to kids. "Imagine having visiting grandchildren come to your home and seeing this," he said, holding up a bag of pills, "in a pantry or medicine cabinet and then opening it up and taking a handful, thinking it was candy." From January to May, about 20 county residents died after taking prescription drugs, Mascara said, compared with 24 people all of last year. "There is a great need in our community for a safe method of disposing unwanted and/or unused drugs," Mascara said. Mascara said those responsible enough to bring in pills aren't the demographic who had overdosed, but visitors or burglars might get their hands on the drugs. On Sunday, a resident in the 80 block of El Camino Real told sheriff's investigators he suspected a woman might have stolen Vicodin and Codeine from his medicine cabinet as she and a man looked at his mobile home during an open house. For six hours Saturday, Mascara's agency and the St. Lucie County Fire District teamed up to provide eight drop-off sites for old medicine and hand out $5 gift cards from CVS, Walgreens and Wal-Mart. "We've taken a lot of these unused or expired medications off the streets, making it a safer community," said St. Lucie County Fire Chief Ron Parrish. Residents can continue to drop off unwanted medicines at the Sheriff's Office, 4700 W. Midway Road.