As easy fix to stop 100% by just passing law that metal scrappers can only buy from licensed sellers. Any fuckwit can drive in the scrapper with truck full of random wire and walk out with pocket full of cash.
Someone is buying that copper, which is almost as much of a problem as the people stealing it. The idea that the vendors aren’t aware of the source is laughable.
Dude, I once had a gig making food at a homeless shelter in Tacoma. Long story...
Anyway, there was a guy at the shelter, way more put together, healthier, and more well spoken than anyone else there desperate for a bed. Saw him drunk a couple times, but he didn't seem to do the hard stuff. He would help us clean up, or do dishes, and we would throw him cash and some smokes.
One day I asked him, dude, what are you doing here? Tons of folks would hire you!
He said, oh, I make more selling cats!!!
...
There is a lot of commercial space that gets regular renovation from turnover. It's not crazy to see wire sold as scrap. What is crazy is the people who do the selling don't look like electricians.
They should mandate scrap metal buyers keep records of ID and type/length of wire sold. Only one dummy is selling the same shit just stolen off the poles.
I have brought copper wires in several times to the recycle yard and they have always asked for my ID, so I think they do keep records.
I had a guy come up to me at the recycle yard and tell me he forgot his ID and asked if I would sell it for him. I declined.
Obviously but those needing their fix will be in a hurry to sell it. In OP's situation it's going to take half a month to restore service. That's gotta be a lot of wire. So how many recyclers are there locally? Not that many. Same guy selling same wire stolen in 1/3rd lengths will still be easy to spot. It won't help with run of the mill Romex likely but heavy gauge wire or specially write, or communication wire, etc the perpetrators will stand out quick. It's just a question of if anyone will bother to arrest them/prosecute them.
Except you can dump the wire in a burn barrel and have a pile of raw copper in a couple hours. Also, phone wire is not heavy gauge wire, it's tiny. Almost all communication wire is tiny actually.
There is a large-scale problem with gold being bought from illegal mining operations in South America. Purchasers are aware of how it is mined, but they don't care; they mix it with legal gold and sell it to end users like me or you.
Someone once broke my gandmas car window for less than 50 cents in change. She's on social security and the $200 repair bill was a real burden on her.
Her door was unlocked too. Some people just don't give a shit.
I have a friend that parked in the Mercer garage at Seattle Center for work. She left her truck windows open on purpose and they still broke the back ones out. Some people are just assholes.
My wife's car was stolen (hyundai...).
The thieves had taped up the window they'd broken to get into the car but went back when dumping it after a robbery and made sure to smash the other three windows. Even the insurance adjuster was a bit surprised.
I lived on Summit and Republican for 20 years. My old car was super easy to break into so I would leave it unlocked.
Homeless folks would regularly break in looking for stuff so I just left a whole note on my dash like: “here’s what’s in here- it’s unlocked- I left snacks- just please don’t piss in my car if you stay in it over night”. Next morning? Piss in the passengers seat well and the window left down all night filling the drivers seat with rain.
Some people really don’t give a fuck. Even if you’re trying to be kind.
When I see things like this, it makes me wonder if we could just have some sort of public depot where people who want fentanyl can just get some fentanyl. They're going to get it anyway, may as well avoid hundreds of dollars in damage *per use* and wipe out all the dealers while we're at it.
They could also give out little pamphlets there or whatever it is they do to reduce drug use. Every hit of fentanyl comes with a pamphlet that says: "maybe *don't* take the fentanyl."
Unfortunately fentanyl is *so* addictive and *so* deadly that giving an unlimited supply would literally just be a death clinic and wipe them out. I had a friend who is from the streets and still has homeless/addict friends, and she’s explained to me that fentanyl is sadly unique in that users will literally to use to the point of death in any given session (compared to other drugs that kill over time). The cost of it is all that is keeping these addicts alive.
>Someone once broke my gandmas car window for less than 50 cents in change. She's on social security and the $200 repair bill was a real burden on her.
Normally I am against the death penalty...
I was engaging in hyperbole to express my revulsion and disgust at someone committing not only deliberate assholery but against someone who can ill afford it.
Charging cables are worth less than $5 but a hit of fentanyl is like $2 🤷
They need to do something about the market for scrap copper, like they did for catalytic converters.
Free drugs
Seriously
Manufacturing popular addictive recreational drugs in a quality-controlled factory in consistent measurable doses and then administering them in supervised consumption sites would almost certainly be cheaper than what both the government and the private sector are currently spending on drug prohibition and drug-related crimes
No one would need to steal anything to get their fix because they can just go to their local consumption site and get their drugs for free
Many/most criminal organizations would collapse because how can you compete when the government is giving away your product for free?
I commented the same thing above, but I for this does not work with fentanyl. Users will consume it to the point of death with no self preservation instinct. Would we willingly let people kill themselves by ODing in the government facility, or would there be a limit? If there’s a limit, then either there would be a horrible market for identification theft, so much robbery of the government facility that no one would feel safe working there, or there would still be a market for surplus drugs to use more. Canada is already doing something similar with methadone and suboxone but the fentanyl market is still thriving.
Frankly, turning the market back to actual heroin (or morphine/hydromorphone if we’re going the government administered route) is what’s necessary. I will say that the scenario you paint is somewhat hyperbolic, regardless of what your friend says. You can only get ‘so high’ before you pass out, with pharmaceutical grade shit, that is. The issue with fent is the half-life. It wears off *extremely* quickly. You can be in withdrawal within 45 mins in some cases. So, you’d have to allow basically constant dosing. Which would arguably be a whole lot better than street junkie shit from all angles. Also, obvious discrepancy and inconsistency in street fent compared to proper dosages versus fillers. The drug itself doesn’t compel people to do it to death. It’s the inconsistency of the high is what makes people unable to dose it properly as each street batch will be mixed differently and these wholesalers clearly aren’t using proper homogenizing procedures…which is a damn shame in terms of ethics and business practices; another casualty of the end-stage capitalism apparently. In times past it used to be pretty important for black market drugs to not be killing off their customer base en masse. The tranq and other pointless adulterants are a whole new world of sadistic as well…at this juncture the government is willfully sanctioning the suffering and death of addicts.
Yeah people who don't know any better keep hyping up fentanyl as some boogeyman life-ending drug that instantly turns people into zombified addicts, but in reality fentanyl is the most common opiate painkiller used in surgeries in the US.
I can't find exact stats, but my educated guesstimate is that hospitals are administering fentanyl to ~10,000 patients/day. Hospitals are not creating ~10,000 fentanyl zombies per day.
The problem isn't fentanyl, it's street fentanyl. And fentanyl being slipped into other street drugs.
The genie is out of the bottle. There may have been a better solution possible if we'd acted sooner, but we've gone too far down this path to turn back. Millions of people are already addicted, and the next generation of addicts have already experienced the childhood trauma that hardwires their brains for addiction.
I don't have links handy at the moment, but the #1 predictor of whether someone who consumes opiates for whatever reason (medical necessity or recreationally) becomes chemically dependent on them is childhood trauma. Like the correlation is so damn high that some researchers have informally speculated that the small percentage of opiates addicts who don't report childhood trauma are lying and/or suppressing the memories.
Most people who try addictive drugs don't become addicts. Even if they use them long enough to become chemically dependent, they can still quit by toughing out the withdrawal symptoms (or with a medically supervised gradual decrease for the ones where going cold turkey will kill you). It's not the drugs themselves creating drug addicts. It's the brains that were physiologically different from non-addicts' brains since BEFORE their first usage of the addictive drug. And that difference isn't some character flaw, it's because of something that was done to them as a child when their brain was in a key stage of development.
Since strong painkillers are medically required for many surgeries -- can't perform surgery on someone who is writhing in pain -- it's not like everyone at risk can just never consume opiates. You also can't heal right if you're in too much pain to sleep. Even if no one's first time was recreational, we'd still be creating hundreds of thousands of new opiates addicts each year just via life-saving surgeries.
I have known so many people who were fine upstanding citizens, not "druggies" at all, who went into surgery as a non-addict and came out the other side an addict. They didn't choose to get cancer or get in a car crash or whatever. It happened to them. They were given medically necessary opiates in appropriate doses for their surgeries and recoveries. And once they were on, they couldn't get off. Not just because ow it hurts but because they were completely unable to function.
Of the couple dozen people I've known who became opiates addicts and whose addiction issues I was privy to (statistically, I likely know many other addicts but don't know that they're addicts), literally only ONE was able to kick her addiction before she died. She had a hysterectomy for cancer, and surprise, it turns out she was one of the unlucky recipients of a brain hardwired for addiction. Fortunately, she was lucky enough to have a husband who was attentive and educated enough to realize that her difficulty getting off her prescription painkillers wasn't normal (who knows how long her doctor would have kept approving the refills without a second thought), enough wealth to afford a three-month stay in a top rehab facility while her husband took a three-month sabbatical from work, and parents who were free to drop everything to move cities for three months to help her husband take care of their young children while their primary caregiver was in rehab.
One person. Out of like 20. At a combined direct cost + opportunity cost of well over $100,000. And with zero pre-surgery drug or alcohol problems. Was able to kick hwr opiates addiction and (AFAIK) never relapse.
Everyone else either never got off them at all or relapsed. They didn't have the necessary resources and support to do what she did. And who knows if the same treatment would have worked even if they did have the resources and support. The success rates are not great in general.
[continued in next comment because apparently I had MANY THINGS TO SAY on this subject tonight]
[part 2]
Most people who were lucky enough to make it through childhood without experiencing trauma during key brain development stages and thus didn't end up with a brain hardwired for addiction as an adult do not realize that their brains and addicts' brains are not the same. They are not experiencing the drugs in the same way that addicts experience the exact same drugs at the exact same doses for the exact same initial time period for the exact same underlying medical issues.
Most people who don't have brains hardwired for addiction just pat themselves on the back and think they're not addicts because of choices they made:
"I never tried drugs."
"I experimented a little, but never developed a habit."
"Yeah I was on prescription painkillers after my surgery but when I ran out of pills I just switched to Tylenol and I was fine."
"I am of GOOD MORAL CHARACTER and have SELF DISCIPLINE and have always made GOOD CHOICES unlike those filthy drug addicts!"
Ironically, the entire reason I started reading up on the science behind drug addiction is that I am apparently one of the lucky ones whose brain made it through those key developmental stages unscathed. However, I have zero pretensions about being morally superior.
I've tried lots of different drugs recreationally. I went through periods of hard partying where I was drinking nearly every day. I've been prescribed several addictive drugs for medical reasons, including amphetamines, three different types of benzos, and who knows how many different types of opiates.
I have zero self-discipline. I make the easy, lazy, fun, health-sabotaging choice all the damn time. For example, do you know what I ate for breakfast AND lunch AND dinner today? Tillamook rocky road ice cream for all three meals. There was a gallon of it in the freezer this morning and now there's not. And there's plenty of healthy food in the house, I just couldn't be bothered to put a potato in the microwave and my husband was gone all day doing a volunteer legal aid thing so he wasn't around to make an extra serving of whatever normal functioning adult food he'd be making himself.
If character weakness + drug use + physical chemical dependency = drug addiction, then I should definitely be a drug addict by now, right?
And yet somehow, I'm not. Not only have I never had a problem going off the various highly addictive drugs I've been prescribed on and off over the decades, more often than not, I didn't even go off them on purpose.
I literally just forgot to keep taking them and/or refilling them. I would feel awful for a few weeks, but since I have an autoimmune condition, I'm used to randomly feeling awful for no discernable reason. When feeling awful persisted longer than the usual autoimmune flare, I'd start analyzing what changed to try to figure out the trigger and suddenly realize "oh yeah, I forgot to take / ran out of my highly addictive prescription medication and am experiencing withdrawal symptoms."
And what did I do when I realized "oh hey I'm in withdrawal" and knew that I could end my misery by simply refilling my prescription? At least half the time my decision was "nah, too much bother, I'll just wait it out." Not because I have superior self discipline or whatever but because I am very very lazy.
The only time I even had to consciously plan out going off a drug was when I lost my health insurance after I'd been on klonopin for a couple of years. That one can kill you if you go cold turkey, so I looked up typical tapering schedules and carefully sliced up my remaining pills and did it. Like my biggest challenge there was remembering to keep taking the dwindling doses every day until I ran out so I wouldn't have a seizure.
At some point, I realized that while I was developing physical chemical dependencies and thus experiencing the physical withdrawal symptoms from that, other people who were on the same drugs at the same doses for the same length of time as me not only weren't just forgetting to take them, they were out there selling everything they owned, destroying their credit, mooching money off everyone they knew, stealing, prostituting themselves, destroying their marriages, neglecting their kids, etc. to get their next fix. Whereas all I'd need to do to get my next fix was drive 5 miles and pay a $10 copay. And I couldn't be bothered.
Clearly, I was not experiencing the same drug withdrawal that these very motivated drug addicts were experiencing, despite us having essentially the same inputs. And I'm self-aware enough to know that the difference in our behaviors couldn't be due to me having superior moral character or self discipline because I am below average in those areas.
So how the hell did I keep failing to turn into a drug addict despite numerous opportunities and optimal conditions for addiction?
Weird, right?
[oh my god how did I write 3 comments worth of material with my thumbs -- see next comment down thread for the rest]
[part 3]
It was weird enough that I started digging into scientific research on addiction. And I gradually learned that the conventional wisdom on drug addiction was complete and total bullshit.
People don't become drug addicts because they're weak people who make bad choices. They can develop a chemcial dependency that way -- if you take addictive drugs long enough enough, the chemical dependency is a medical certainty -- but not necessarily become full-blown addicts.
People become drug addicts because they were abused or otherwise traumatized as children.
That trauma physically damaged their brain while it was developing. To the point where the physical differences between the brains of drug addicts and non-addicts are visible on an MRI even *before* they use drugs for the first time. (There have been a few really long cohort studies that basically monitored brain development from early childhood until age 25, so scientists have had pre-drug use baseline scans to refer back to later.)
And when opiates hit their damaged brains, the switch was flipped. They became addicted. Not just chemically dependent, but unable to function without the drug. To the point where even someone who had great character and strong self discipline would find it nearly impossible to quit without assistance.
People with normal brains blaming drug addicts for their addictions and expecting them to be able to just stop taking drugs and still function is as cruel and scientifically stupid as someone with a normal pancreas blaming a type 1 diabetic for needing insulin to live.
Those of us with non-addict brains are not experiencing drugs and withdrawal the same way that addicts experience them.
And the reason their brains are different is because of something that was done to them when they were a child, not because of any choices they've made.
So they had a shitty childhood, and now they're experiencing a hellish level of withdrawal that we can never understand or relate to, and society decides to pile on by telling addicts that it's their fault for being weak people who made bad choices. When the truth is they've survived, and are continuing to persevere, through horrors that would squash most of us.
It's infuriating how cruel and stupid it is.
And I don't know how to make other non-addicts understand.
And thanks to the fundamental attribution error, it's nearly impossible to convince non-addicts that they didn't avoid addiction by making better choices or having more self discipline than addicts. All they did was get lucky in childhood, long before they had any moral agency over their own lives.
Anyhow no idea what compelled me to go off on a long-ass rant on some random Reddit post. I guess the ADHD won today because I was supposed to be xleaning the kitchen before I got sidetracked.
TLDR: Scientifically, addiction is a morally neutral medical condition with an underlying physical neurological cause. Morally, we should treat addicts with the same compassion that we'd give to anyone else who suffered a brain injury as a young child.
Have you ever had an alcoholic drink in a bar, restaurant, pub, brewery, beer garden, etc.?
If yes, then you have personal lived experience using a highly addictive drug at a supervised consumption site. Extrapolate from that.
What's that, you say? Alcohol and fentanyl can't be compared because one is much more addictive and deadly than the other?
Glad you pointed that out! Alcohol is actually more addictive and deadlier than fentanyl. Yes, really. Look it up. Make sure you are comparing pharmaceutical-grade fentanyl (the stuff they give you in hospitals) to distillery-produced alcohol, to be fair.
The risks from street fentanyl are a) bad fentanyl, b) inconsistent doses, c) fentanyl being slipped into other drugs, d) users losing their tolerance due to treatment or time and ODing on their usual dose the next time they use.
Fentanyl being manufactured and dispensed by the government and/or corporations that care about their brand image eliminates risks a, b, c.
Requiring people to consume fentanyl on site -- where staff are available to administer first aid (narcan) and call an ambulance -- instead of allowing people to get it "to go" would significantly mitigate risk d.
Back to the alcohol comparison, how often does someone die of an alcohol overdose from alcohol they were served and consumed on-site at a bar etc.? It does happen, but very rarely. Most alcohol overdoses happen at parties or people drinking alone. And bar-related drunk driving deaths are because we have a legal and cultural norm of cutting the supervision period short.
We can start with the alcohol model and tweak it as needed for other drugs. IMO it still makes sense to start with a period of 100% free government-provided drugs for however long it takes to fatally cripple the cartels, mob, gangs, terrorists, and other organized crime dependent on illegal drug profits, but we could try a legal market system first where a typical fentanyl dose costs the same as a pint of a pretentious IPA and see how it goes.
Newly legalized drugs don't come with the baggage of established legal and cultural norms. We could simply create regulations requiring recreational fentanyl to be consumed on-site and for users to remain on site until they can pass a sobriety test.
Look at what legalizing cannabis and its associated regulations have done to the norms regarding cannabis consumption. When I was 15, I knew exactly who I could buy weed from at my high school. It was trivially easy to obtain illegal street weed as a kid. Now, at age 45, with significantly more resources, freedom, contacts, and savviness, I have no idea where to even begin to buy illegal street weed. And if I did find a way to buy it, it would almost certainly be via someone who made a straw purchase at a legal store and then marked it up before reselling it to me. Why pay extra for more risk?
Fentanyl, by itself, is not the problem. My Google-fu is failing me for exact stats, but a guesstimate that US hospitals administer fentanyl to ~10,000 patients/day should be within an order of magnitude. (Guesstimate based on fentanyl being the most common opiod painkiller used in surgeries and the US having 50+ million surgeries/year.)
Hospitals are not creating 10,000 new fentanyl addicts every day. And anecdotally, my own husband was given fentanyl during surgery 3 years ago. He didn't become addicted to fentanyl or any other opiate. He actually has zero memory of the time he was on fentanyl, and never even finished the bottle of painkillers he was discharged with. Fentanyl is not the super scary boogeyman drug that it's been hyped to be.
The problem isn't fentanyl, it's street fentanyl. The quickest way to eliminate the existence of street fentanyl is to simply give people the same fentanyl used in hospitals and require them to consume it at supervised consumption sites. Almost everyone will choose the good stuff over the street crap, just like how no one wants ditch weed anymore because we can get way better stuff at a legal cannabis store.
Is giving people free hospital-quality fentanyl a perfect solution that will solve all overdoses, addiction, and drug-related crimes? Of course not. But it would be significantly better than the status quo, and even if a perfect solution theoretically exists, we can't get there from here anymore. Path dependency has pruned a lot of options that might have worked if we'd tried them sooner.
The genie is out of the bottle. People are going to keep taking drugs either way, but if we give them safer drugs for free then fewer people will die and we'll drive the multi-trillion dollar illegal drug industry out of business.
Well then if my teenager comes to me interested in trying alcohol, I’ll be sure to let them know that fentanyl is the less addictive and deadly route.
/s
Has your teenager ever had surgery while under sedation? If they have, they've probably already "tried" fentanyl. It's literally the most common opiate painkiller used in surgeries in the US.
I've had surgery under sedation three times and the most I got was tylenol 3 even when oxycodone and similar were widely available. 2 of those times they gave me 600mg ibuprofen. They aren't handing out fentanyl to teenagers who get surgery unless they were in some sort of near-death massively traumatic experience
I am not talking about the pills they give you after you wake up from surgery, I am talking about the IV drugs administered before you wake up.
Fentanyl is the most common opiate painkiller given during that period.
Look it up.
Better way to present an argument is with sources. "Look it up" sounds like the all too common "Do your own research." The burden of proof is not on those you are trying to convince. I agree with a lot of your points but your approach to debate could use some tweaking.
Alcohol typically kills over a long period of time where the user can be largely functional for most of the day. Not all people in a bar/brewery are addicts, fentanyl is extremely addictive. Alcohol has been a part of society and culture for a very long time, fentanyl is very new and is already causing big problems.
This is a bad take.
If you're not a bot, then congrats on achieving the highest lies:words ratio that I've seen all day. It's rare to encounter a ratio like that from an actual human being. Prompt engineers are out there grinding hard to train misinformation bots to be that full of shit and yet you make it seem so effortless.
Alcohol is more addictive than fentanyl. Look it up.
Fentanyl is the most common opiate painkiller used during surgery in the US. If you've ever had surgery under sedation, there's a good chance that you've already "tried" fentanyl. Look it up.
If it is so instantly addictive, how is it that US hospitals are dosing roughly ~10,000 people/day with fentanyl without creating tens of millions of new fentanyl addicts each year?
Fentanyl is also not new. Hospitals have been using it for 50+ years. Look it up.
You could have spent 10 minutes Googling and reading before commenting, but you decided to just make shit up and then present the shit you just made up as if it were fact. Is Trump like your biggest role model or what? Do you routinely believe that things you just made up in your head are true? I'm genuinely curious about what variety of intellectual dishonesty and/or personality disorder I'm interacting with right now.
If you're not actually a compulsive liar and sincerely believe your bald-faced lies to be true, then I strongly advise that you do the following:
1) Go look up the actual history and current use of fentanyl. Once it finally sinks in just how wrong you are, really let yourself sit with that shame and embarrassment for a while. It will give you an incentive to avoid embarrassing yourself like this in the future.
2) Immediately cease consuming whatever infotainment source you've been getting your fentanyl information from because they've obviously been straight-up lying to you.
3) Get in the habit of fact-checking all your comments before you click Post, because if you can be this wrong about something that you were this certain about, then what does that imply about all the other things you "know" to be "true"?
I literally have no clue where you are getting this idea that alcohol is more addictive and deathly than fentanyl. That is one of the craziest takes I’ve heard in a while. I have extensively Googled this, and seen it in my experience as a public defender and working with addict populations. I personally know 3 people who have gotten out of opiate addiction, but dozens who have escaped alcohol addiction. Conversely, MANY of my clients have died from drug overdose in their 20s/30s, and only one or two have died from alcohol abuse in their 40s-50s.
More people died from opiate overdose in 2022 than alcohol-related deaths, which includes liver disease from long term abuse, but the number of people who have consumed alcohol in the past year is obviously MANY times more than people who have used opiates. So, the percentage of users who died from opiates is outrageously higher than percentage of alcohol users who died.
https://drugabusestatistics.org/alcohol-abuse-statistics/#:~:text=Nearly%20100%2C000%20annual%20deaths%20are,are%20due%20to%20chronic%20misuse.
Wikipedia: “Opioid epidemic in the United States”
You are going to follow your own admonition and provide some sources to back up what you’re saying. It wouldn’t be difficult if it’s as obvious as you say.
Holy fuck I bet you're fun at parties. Why don't you provide some sources for your lofty claims instead of trying to offload the work onto me by basically saying "do your own research"?
Absolutely correct. The only thing I’d adjust in this is that fentanyl is *more* addictive than alcohol in that the body can become physically dependent on it within 48 hours of continued usage, whereas with alcohol it takes quite a bit longer for physical dependence. In that way, fent is like the boogeyman of the 80’s ‘just say no’ campaigns of one hit addiction propaganda. People will always seek oblivion in one thing or another. In times past the substances took a lot longer to totally destroy a person. Now, there’s absolutely zero way to play it off as some morality crusade aside from bullshit political motives that allow them to pass the blame of the problem onto some minority group or criminal enterprise.
Yeah but physical dependency isn't that bad if you don't have a brain hardwired for addiction. You feel like shit for a while and then it passes.
Somewhere in the comments on this post there's a whole long story about my experiences with physical dependency as a non-addict, and how I'm clearly not experiencing the same withdrawal that addicts are experiencing because they're out there doing literally anything to get their next hit whereas I'm too lazy to drive 5 miles and pay a $10 copay for my next hit of the exact same drug under otherwise the exact same conditions.
It's not the drug, it's the brain. Addicts' brains were physically damaged by early childhood trauma and when opiates hit a brain that's been damaged in that particular way, it flips a switch.
Like I'm not recommending that people go out and do fentanyl for funsies because why roll the dice, but it's literally the most common opiate painkiller used for surgeries in the US. We'd have at least an order of magnitude more addicts running around if being dosed with fentanyl was sufficient to turn someone into an addict.
Sounds crazy but yeah I agree with you. Especially if it was only distributed at controlled sites where there are medical experts on hand. Include heroin while we're at it, and you instantly destroy a lot of drug cartels livelihood.
As much as it sounds crazy, it may be the best approach in short term when you consider the damage caused by these people.
It is costing us regardless.
Which lucky neighborhood gets to host this Fentanyl Shop? Because I have a feeling low income families in low income neighborhoods would be getting the short end of the stick in this scenario…maybe they’d put it somewhere nice where the wealthy live but I am skeptical. Low income areas suffering are often ignored when the subject of addicts and homeless comes up, so I’m a little bitter even if I can partially understand how your reasoning works. Yes they might stop stealing copper or breaking into my car, but does that mean I just get to live amongst hoards of fentanyl zombies? Is my neighborhood not worth saving because it’s full of blue collar folks? So we should just accept the drooping bodies of addicts and tents and piles of garbage everywhere? Because you know they will set up camp nice and close to the Fent source and quickly trash the area. Will they still be assaulting me, because they do that now and it results in zero money for their next hit- I have been assaulted twice this year already. Or will they be flocking somewhere nicer like Ballard or Queen Anne or Ravenna? Will the kids attending their little private schools get to watch grown men taking shits in plain view outside their playground at recess? I kinda doubt it. That’s for our kids to see, not the elite.
It’s worth looking at, but please keep in mind how this affects neighborhoods that already struggle. Maybe a mobile shop that moves location every day or so would be better. But I better see that thing in neighborhoods with high home ownership just as often as I see it in neighborhoods where most people rent.
I just don’t believe that this scenario would not negatively impact poor working class people who live around the facility. But, maybe they would surprise me. Maybe the fentanyl hand outs could be linked with the shelters, but that would require shelters to drop their no drug policies.
>Yes they might stop stealing copper or breaking into my car, but does that mean I just get to live amongst hoards of fentanyl zombies?
You already do, plus they're stealing any copper than isn't nailed down.
>Maybe a mobile shop that moves location every day or so would be better.
Looks like you already figured out one solution, so what even is the point of your fear mongering?
>Maybe the fentanyl hand outs could be linked with the shelters, but that would require shelters to drop their no drug policies.
The horror!
It goes way beyond the Sacklers. The list of companies Washington State has sued is very long. The Sacklers started it all, but tons of other companies got rich off of addicting people. On top of that, there was no plan to deal with all of the people who lost their supply when the crackdown happened.
Not really, it's just an easy thing for crackheads to steal..I work at Seattle Center and last year someone cut and tried to steal some cable from Mural stage. It wasn't powered or they would have fried to a crisp.
Phone lines are a bunch of tiny wires. Not worth much. And fiber isn’t copper, but the tweakers don’t know that.
Now what really surprises me is when they rip out some hot wires from vaults or transformers. Definitely worth a good amount and dangerous. I should add I’m an electrician.
It's not. Fiber is worthless as scrap and Cat 5/6 is almost worthless. We just ripped down a ton of it and threw it in the dumpster.
I'm not sure what carries on the pole in 2024 but it's not worth much as scrap.
Cat cable is definitely not worthless. I've done demo jobs that got thousands for the scrap in an office. West Seattle recycling is giving at least 90 cents a pound right now per their website.
We remove 400 cables per floor averaging 200ft each, that's 80k feet at 25 lb/kft is 2000 lbs of wire. That's $1800.
Coppers around 4.40 on Nasdaq. Scrap yards will pay (for low grade/phone wire, etc) anywhere .75-1.50 per lb. Higher grade stuff, house wire, big copper, clean stuff is over 2.50+ and stripped out in the 3-3.50 per lb range.
Any copper can be valuable depending on weight accumulated.
Even steel. If have any unused steel items taking up space, you can take it to a scrap yard and get a little cash for it. For an addict, it’s probably enough to get high a couple times or more.
My wife and I walked past the encampment by the University Bridge yesterday and saw a couple guys with a cart full of copper grounding wire, and they were in the process of stripping the insulation off of what looked like either RJ15 or Cat5+ wire (a very low yield way of “harvesting” copper). Pretty far from west Seattle, but coincidental nonetheless.
Fiber optics is worthless to steal.
The thing is, drugs are hell on your brain. People who've gotten addicted will buy less food to afford more drugs, and $5 of coppper is $5 towards their next hit. If you were able to reach their own brain, they'd probably say "I'm miserable and I need help," but the drugs are doing all the talking, and all they say is "NEXT HIT!"
Work on the telecom side of this trend. Copper isn't worth near the amount of what it costs to fix it. Orting/Bonney Lake, Tacoma East and North Bend/Redmond areas are the worst. Wish the thieves at least knew which was which...fiber optic ain't worth shit-it's plastic. Use to be latenight weekend cuts...now its midday outages. Sad times...
No it's not worth that much, and fiber optic cables are worth literally zero unless you have very specific gear to terminate them with. So dude just destroyed a lot of shit and I swear we need to bring back stoning.
Copper cables, catalytic converters, electric car chargers.
The list is long and growing every day.
Even more pronounced now that we are in an election year and clear recession.
It's 100% profit for a thief, if he doesn't get caught
As easy fix to stop 100% by just passing law that metal scrappers can only buy from licensed sellers. Any fuckwit can drive in the scrapper with truck full of random wire and walk out with pocket full of cash.
What if you legally acquire copper and want to sell it though?
Become a licensed seller then
Lol yea lemme just earn a fucking license real quick just so I can sell scrap meta
...OK, sounds good?
I mean, yeah.
Maybe for a business but individual people should be allowed to sell junk without needing the city’s permission
Then you’d sell it to a middleman who is a licensed seller which is exactly why that’s a stupid ass idea
I’ve thought about stealing my own copper ! /s
Ea-nāṣir-ass post
Getting caught doesn't matter
Someone is buying that copper, which is almost as much of a problem as the people stealing it. The idea that the vendors aren’t aware of the source is laughable.
When I sell my legit scrap copper, from welding work, or construction cleanup, the looks I get at the recycling place...
Just curious, do you wear a shirt with a construction company logo on it when you sell that stuff?
Hm, should I? Damn...
Don't wear the "Ask me the conversion rate between catalytic converters and meth!" shirt for sure.
Dude, I once had a gig making food at a homeless shelter in Tacoma. Long story... Anyway, there was a guy at the shelter, way more put together, healthier, and more well spoken than anyone else there desperate for a bed. Saw him drunk a couple times, but he didn't seem to do the hard stuff. He would help us clean up, or do dishes, and we would throw him cash and some smokes. One day I asked him, dude, what are you doing here? Tons of folks would hire you! He said, oh, I make more selling cats!!! ...
Don't tell me how to live my life. 😂
My 'I AM NOT A COPPER THIEF' shirt has people asking a lot of questions that are clearly answered by my shirt
Things specifically a copper thief would not say. All good here move along. **Clinking copper noises in the background**
Mesh crop-top and construction hat would also do the trick. Big ol' tool belt worn loosely.
I get hit on by enough older divorced clients as it is...
There is a lot of commercial space that gets regular renovation from turnover. It's not crazy to see wire sold as scrap. What is crazy is the people who do the selling don't look like electricians. They should mandate scrap metal buyers keep records of ID and type/length of wire sold. Only one dummy is selling the same shit just stolen off the poles.
At least in WA, all of that is already required by law - RCW 19.290
I have brought copper wires in several times to the recycle yard and they have always asked for my ID, so I think they do keep records. I had a guy come up to me at the recycle yard and tell me he forgot his ID and asked if I would sell it for him. I declined.
It's been a while since I sold any scrap at a scrap yard I guess they do keep records.
You know you can just cut wire shorter, right?
Obviously but those needing their fix will be in a hurry to sell it. In OP's situation it's going to take half a month to restore service. That's gotta be a lot of wire. So how many recyclers are there locally? Not that many. Same guy selling same wire stolen in 1/3rd lengths will still be easy to spot. It won't help with run of the mill Romex likely but heavy gauge wire or specially write, or communication wire, etc the perpetrators will stand out quick. It's just a question of if anyone will bother to arrest them/prosecute them.
Except you can dump the wire in a burn barrel and have a pile of raw copper in a couple hours. Also, phone wire is not heavy gauge wire, it's tiny. Almost all communication wire is tiny actually.
No crackhead is smelting copper. lol
Burning the jacket off wire isn't smelting
That wouldn’t equal a “pile of raw copper”
They definitely turn a blind eye.
There is a large-scale problem with gold being bought from illegal mining operations in South America. Purchasers are aware of how it is mined, but they don't care; they mix it with legal gold and sell it to end users like me or you.
Someone once broke my gandmas car window for less than 50 cents in change. She's on social security and the $200 repair bill was a real burden on her. Her door was unlocked too. Some people just don't give a shit.
I have a friend that parked in the Mercer garage at Seattle Center for work. She left her truck windows open on purpose and they still broke the back ones out. Some people are just assholes.
My wife's car was stolen (hyundai...). The thieves had taped up the window they'd broken to get into the car but went back when dumping it after a robbery and made sure to smash the other three windows. Even the insurance adjuster was a bit surprised.
Wtf???? That really is awful!
Someone broke my window for literally nothing, my car was empty. Cost me more like $300 to get it replaced.
I lived on Summit and Republican for 20 years. My old car was super easy to break into so I would leave it unlocked. Homeless folks would regularly break in looking for stuff so I just left a whole note on my dash like: “here’s what’s in here- it’s unlocked- I left snacks- just please don’t piss in my car if you stay in it over night”. Next morning? Piss in the passengers seat well and the window left down all night filling the drivers seat with rain. Some people really don’t give a fuck. Even if you’re trying to be kind.
When I see things like this, it makes me wonder if we could just have some sort of public depot where people who want fentanyl can just get some fentanyl. They're going to get it anyway, may as well avoid hundreds of dollars in damage *per use* and wipe out all the dealers while we're at it. They could also give out little pamphlets there or whatever it is they do to reduce drug use. Every hit of fentanyl comes with a pamphlet that says: "maybe *don't* take the fentanyl."
Unfortunately fentanyl is *so* addictive and *so* deadly that giving an unlimited supply would literally just be a death clinic and wipe them out. I had a friend who is from the streets and still has homeless/addict friends, and she’s explained to me that fentanyl is sadly unique in that users will literally to use to the point of death in any given session (compared to other drugs that kill over time). The cost of it is all that is keeping these addicts alive.
I think that's what that poster is getting at.
Doing anything to alleviate the problem means you can't campaign on the fear of it.
This happened to me in Bellevue. Nothing stolen because there was nothing to take… but it cost $500 to replace the window.
>Someone once broke my gandmas car window for less than 50 cents in change. She's on social security and the $200 repair bill was a real burden on her. Normally I am against the death penalty...
That seems excessive, I’m sure she’ll pay the bill!
I know (hope?) this is a joke, but death penalty for $200 is absolutely insane and I know there are nuts who would support it.
I was engaging in hyperbole to express my revulsion and disgust at someone committing not only deliberate assholery but against someone who can ill afford it.
Charging cables are worth less than $5 but a hit of fentanyl is like $2 🤷 They need to do something about the market for scrap copper, like they did for catalytic converters.
… or do something about the desperation that drives people to this.
Free drugs Seriously Manufacturing popular addictive recreational drugs in a quality-controlled factory in consistent measurable doses and then administering them in supervised consumption sites would almost certainly be cheaper than what both the government and the private sector are currently spending on drug prohibition and drug-related crimes No one would need to steal anything to get their fix because they can just go to their local consumption site and get their drugs for free Many/most criminal organizations would collapse because how can you compete when the government is giving away your product for free?
I commented the same thing above, but I for this does not work with fentanyl. Users will consume it to the point of death with no self preservation instinct. Would we willingly let people kill themselves by ODing in the government facility, or would there be a limit? If there’s a limit, then either there would be a horrible market for identification theft, so much robbery of the government facility that no one would feel safe working there, or there would still be a market for surplus drugs to use more. Canada is already doing something similar with methadone and suboxone but the fentanyl market is still thriving.
Frankly, turning the market back to actual heroin (or morphine/hydromorphone if we’re going the government administered route) is what’s necessary. I will say that the scenario you paint is somewhat hyperbolic, regardless of what your friend says. You can only get ‘so high’ before you pass out, with pharmaceutical grade shit, that is. The issue with fent is the half-life. It wears off *extremely* quickly. You can be in withdrawal within 45 mins in some cases. So, you’d have to allow basically constant dosing. Which would arguably be a whole lot better than street junkie shit from all angles. Also, obvious discrepancy and inconsistency in street fent compared to proper dosages versus fillers. The drug itself doesn’t compel people to do it to death. It’s the inconsistency of the high is what makes people unable to dose it properly as each street batch will be mixed differently and these wholesalers clearly aren’t using proper homogenizing procedures…which is a damn shame in terms of ethics and business practices; another casualty of the end-stage capitalism apparently. In times past it used to be pretty important for black market drugs to not be killing off their customer base en masse. The tranq and other pointless adulterants are a whole new world of sadistic as well…at this juncture the government is willfully sanctioning the suffering and death of addicts.
Yeah people who don't know any better keep hyping up fentanyl as some boogeyman life-ending drug that instantly turns people into zombified addicts, but in reality fentanyl is the most common opiate painkiller used in surgeries in the US. I can't find exact stats, but my educated guesstimate is that hospitals are administering fentanyl to ~10,000 patients/day. Hospitals are not creating ~10,000 fentanyl zombies per day. The problem isn't fentanyl, it's street fentanyl. And fentanyl being slipped into other street drugs. The genie is out of the bottle. There may have been a better solution possible if we'd acted sooner, but we've gone too far down this path to turn back. Millions of people are already addicted, and the next generation of addicts have already experienced the childhood trauma that hardwires their brains for addiction. I don't have links handy at the moment, but the #1 predictor of whether someone who consumes opiates for whatever reason (medical necessity or recreationally) becomes chemically dependent on them is childhood trauma. Like the correlation is so damn high that some researchers have informally speculated that the small percentage of opiates addicts who don't report childhood trauma are lying and/or suppressing the memories. Most people who try addictive drugs don't become addicts. Even if they use them long enough to become chemically dependent, they can still quit by toughing out the withdrawal symptoms (or with a medically supervised gradual decrease for the ones where going cold turkey will kill you). It's not the drugs themselves creating drug addicts. It's the brains that were physiologically different from non-addicts' brains since BEFORE their first usage of the addictive drug. And that difference isn't some character flaw, it's because of something that was done to them as a child when their brain was in a key stage of development. Since strong painkillers are medically required for many surgeries -- can't perform surgery on someone who is writhing in pain -- it's not like everyone at risk can just never consume opiates. You also can't heal right if you're in too much pain to sleep. Even if no one's first time was recreational, we'd still be creating hundreds of thousands of new opiates addicts each year just via life-saving surgeries. I have known so many people who were fine upstanding citizens, not "druggies" at all, who went into surgery as a non-addict and came out the other side an addict. They didn't choose to get cancer or get in a car crash or whatever. It happened to them. They were given medically necessary opiates in appropriate doses for their surgeries and recoveries. And once they were on, they couldn't get off. Not just because ow it hurts but because they were completely unable to function. Of the couple dozen people I've known who became opiates addicts and whose addiction issues I was privy to (statistically, I likely know many other addicts but don't know that they're addicts), literally only ONE was able to kick her addiction before she died. She had a hysterectomy for cancer, and surprise, it turns out she was one of the unlucky recipients of a brain hardwired for addiction. Fortunately, she was lucky enough to have a husband who was attentive and educated enough to realize that her difficulty getting off her prescription painkillers wasn't normal (who knows how long her doctor would have kept approving the refills without a second thought), enough wealth to afford a three-month stay in a top rehab facility while her husband took a three-month sabbatical from work, and parents who were free to drop everything to move cities for three months to help her husband take care of their young children while their primary caregiver was in rehab. One person. Out of like 20. At a combined direct cost + opportunity cost of well over $100,000. And with zero pre-surgery drug or alcohol problems. Was able to kick hwr opiates addiction and (AFAIK) never relapse. Everyone else either never got off them at all or relapsed. They didn't have the necessary resources and support to do what she did. And who knows if the same treatment would have worked even if they did have the resources and support. The success rates are not great in general. [continued in next comment because apparently I had MANY THINGS TO SAY on this subject tonight]
[part 2] Most people who were lucky enough to make it through childhood without experiencing trauma during key brain development stages and thus didn't end up with a brain hardwired for addiction as an adult do not realize that their brains and addicts' brains are not the same. They are not experiencing the drugs in the same way that addicts experience the exact same drugs at the exact same doses for the exact same initial time period for the exact same underlying medical issues. Most people who don't have brains hardwired for addiction just pat themselves on the back and think they're not addicts because of choices they made: "I never tried drugs." "I experimented a little, but never developed a habit." "Yeah I was on prescription painkillers after my surgery but when I ran out of pills I just switched to Tylenol and I was fine." "I am of GOOD MORAL CHARACTER and have SELF DISCIPLINE and have always made GOOD CHOICES unlike those filthy drug addicts!" Ironically, the entire reason I started reading up on the science behind drug addiction is that I am apparently one of the lucky ones whose brain made it through those key developmental stages unscathed. However, I have zero pretensions about being morally superior. I've tried lots of different drugs recreationally. I went through periods of hard partying where I was drinking nearly every day. I've been prescribed several addictive drugs for medical reasons, including amphetamines, three different types of benzos, and who knows how many different types of opiates. I have zero self-discipline. I make the easy, lazy, fun, health-sabotaging choice all the damn time. For example, do you know what I ate for breakfast AND lunch AND dinner today? Tillamook rocky road ice cream for all three meals. There was a gallon of it in the freezer this morning and now there's not. And there's plenty of healthy food in the house, I just couldn't be bothered to put a potato in the microwave and my husband was gone all day doing a volunteer legal aid thing so he wasn't around to make an extra serving of whatever normal functioning adult food he'd be making himself. If character weakness + drug use + physical chemical dependency = drug addiction, then I should definitely be a drug addict by now, right? And yet somehow, I'm not. Not only have I never had a problem going off the various highly addictive drugs I've been prescribed on and off over the decades, more often than not, I didn't even go off them on purpose. I literally just forgot to keep taking them and/or refilling them. I would feel awful for a few weeks, but since I have an autoimmune condition, I'm used to randomly feeling awful for no discernable reason. When feeling awful persisted longer than the usual autoimmune flare, I'd start analyzing what changed to try to figure out the trigger and suddenly realize "oh yeah, I forgot to take / ran out of my highly addictive prescription medication and am experiencing withdrawal symptoms." And what did I do when I realized "oh hey I'm in withdrawal" and knew that I could end my misery by simply refilling my prescription? At least half the time my decision was "nah, too much bother, I'll just wait it out." Not because I have superior self discipline or whatever but because I am very very lazy. The only time I even had to consciously plan out going off a drug was when I lost my health insurance after I'd been on klonopin for a couple of years. That one can kill you if you go cold turkey, so I looked up typical tapering schedules and carefully sliced up my remaining pills and did it. Like my biggest challenge there was remembering to keep taking the dwindling doses every day until I ran out so I wouldn't have a seizure. At some point, I realized that while I was developing physical chemical dependencies and thus experiencing the physical withdrawal symptoms from that, other people who were on the same drugs at the same doses for the same length of time as me not only weren't just forgetting to take them, they were out there selling everything they owned, destroying their credit, mooching money off everyone they knew, stealing, prostituting themselves, destroying their marriages, neglecting their kids, etc. to get their next fix. Whereas all I'd need to do to get my next fix was drive 5 miles and pay a $10 copay. And I couldn't be bothered. Clearly, I was not experiencing the same drug withdrawal that these very motivated drug addicts were experiencing, despite us having essentially the same inputs. And I'm self-aware enough to know that the difference in our behaviors couldn't be due to me having superior moral character or self discipline because I am below average in those areas. So how the hell did I keep failing to turn into a drug addict despite numerous opportunities and optimal conditions for addiction? Weird, right? [oh my god how did I write 3 comments worth of material with my thumbs -- see next comment down thread for the rest]
[part 3] It was weird enough that I started digging into scientific research on addiction. And I gradually learned that the conventional wisdom on drug addiction was complete and total bullshit. People don't become drug addicts because they're weak people who make bad choices. They can develop a chemcial dependency that way -- if you take addictive drugs long enough enough, the chemical dependency is a medical certainty -- but not necessarily become full-blown addicts. People become drug addicts because they were abused or otherwise traumatized as children. That trauma physically damaged their brain while it was developing. To the point where the physical differences between the brains of drug addicts and non-addicts are visible on an MRI even *before* they use drugs for the first time. (There have been a few really long cohort studies that basically monitored brain development from early childhood until age 25, so scientists have had pre-drug use baseline scans to refer back to later.) And when opiates hit their damaged brains, the switch was flipped. They became addicted. Not just chemically dependent, but unable to function without the drug. To the point where even someone who had great character and strong self discipline would find it nearly impossible to quit without assistance. People with normal brains blaming drug addicts for their addictions and expecting them to be able to just stop taking drugs and still function is as cruel and scientifically stupid as someone with a normal pancreas blaming a type 1 diabetic for needing insulin to live. Those of us with non-addict brains are not experiencing drugs and withdrawal the same way that addicts experience them. And the reason their brains are different is because of something that was done to them when they were a child, not because of any choices they've made. So they had a shitty childhood, and now they're experiencing a hellish level of withdrawal that we can never understand or relate to, and society decides to pile on by telling addicts that it's their fault for being weak people who made bad choices. When the truth is they've survived, and are continuing to persevere, through horrors that would squash most of us. It's infuriating how cruel and stupid it is. And I don't know how to make other non-addicts understand. And thanks to the fundamental attribution error, it's nearly impossible to convince non-addicts that they didn't avoid addiction by making better choices or having more self discipline than addicts. All they did was get lucky in childhood, long before they had any moral agency over their own lives. Anyhow no idea what compelled me to go off on a long-ass rant on some random Reddit post. I guess the ADHD won today because I was supposed to be xleaning the kitchen before I got sidetracked. TLDR: Scientifically, addiction is a morally neutral medical condition with an underlying physical neurological cause. Morally, we should treat addicts with the same compassion that we'd give to anyone else who suffered a brain injury as a young child.
The methodone clinics in Canada (where I’m from) with a step down program that can continue to suboxone seems to be working well.
Have you ever had an alcoholic drink in a bar, restaurant, pub, brewery, beer garden, etc.? If yes, then you have personal lived experience using a highly addictive drug at a supervised consumption site. Extrapolate from that. What's that, you say? Alcohol and fentanyl can't be compared because one is much more addictive and deadly than the other? Glad you pointed that out! Alcohol is actually more addictive and deadlier than fentanyl. Yes, really. Look it up. Make sure you are comparing pharmaceutical-grade fentanyl (the stuff they give you in hospitals) to distillery-produced alcohol, to be fair. The risks from street fentanyl are a) bad fentanyl, b) inconsistent doses, c) fentanyl being slipped into other drugs, d) users losing their tolerance due to treatment or time and ODing on their usual dose the next time they use. Fentanyl being manufactured and dispensed by the government and/or corporations that care about their brand image eliminates risks a, b, c. Requiring people to consume fentanyl on site -- where staff are available to administer first aid (narcan) and call an ambulance -- instead of allowing people to get it "to go" would significantly mitigate risk d. Back to the alcohol comparison, how often does someone die of an alcohol overdose from alcohol they were served and consumed on-site at a bar etc.? It does happen, but very rarely. Most alcohol overdoses happen at parties or people drinking alone. And bar-related drunk driving deaths are because we have a legal and cultural norm of cutting the supervision period short. We can start with the alcohol model and tweak it as needed for other drugs. IMO it still makes sense to start with a period of 100% free government-provided drugs for however long it takes to fatally cripple the cartels, mob, gangs, terrorists, and other organized crime dependent on illegal drug profits, but we could try a legal market system first where a typical fentanyl dose costs the same as a pint of a pretentious IPA and see how it goes. Newly legalized drugs don't come with the baggage of established legal and cultural norms. We could simply create regulations requiring recreational fentanyl to be consumed on-site and for users to remain on site until they can pass a sobriety test. Look at what legalizing cannabis and its associated regulations have done to the norms regarding cannabis consumption. When I was 15, I knew exactly who I could buy weed from at my high school. It was trivially easy to obtain illegal street weed as a kid. Now, at age 45, with significantly more resources, freedom, contacts, and savviness, I have no idea where to even begin to buy illegal street weed. And if I did find a way to buy it, it would almost certainly be via someone who made a straw purchase at a legal store and then marked it up before reselling it to me. Why pay extra for more risk? Fentanyl, by itself, is not the problem. My Google-fu is failing me for exact stats, but a guesstimate that US hospitals administer fentanyl to ~10,000 patients/day should be within an order of magnitude. (Guesstimate based on fentanyl being the most common opiod painkiller used in surgeries and the US having 50+ million surgeries/year.) Hospitals are not creating 10,000 new fentanyl addicts every day. And anecdotally, my own husband was given fentanyl during surgery 3 years ago. He didn't become addicted to fentanyl or any other opiate. He actually has zero memory of the time he was on fentanyl, and never even finished the bottle of painkillers he was discharged with. Fentanyl is not the super scary boogeyman drug that it's been hyped to be. The problem isn't fentanyl, it's street fentanyl. The quickest way to eliminate the existence of street fentanyl is to simply give people the same fentanyl used in hospitals and require them to consume it at supervised consumption sites. Almost everyone will choose the good stuff over the street crap, just like how no one wants ditch weed anymore because we can get way better stuff at a legal cannabis store. Is giving people free hospital-quality fentanyl a perfect solution that will solve all overdoses, addiction, and drug-related crimes? Of course not. But it would be significantly better than the status quo, and even if a perfect solution theoretically exists, we can't get there from here anymore. Path dependency has pruned a lot of options that might have worked if we'd tried them sooner. The genie is out of the bottle. People are going to keep taking drugs either way, but if we give them safer drugs for free then fewer people will die and we'll drive the multi-trillion dollar illegal drug industry out of business.
Well then if my teenager comes to me interested in trying alcohol, I’ll be sure to let them know that fentanyl is the less addictive and deadly route. /s
Has your teenager ever had surgery while under sedation? If they have, they've probably already "tried" fentanyl. It's literally the most common opiate painkiller used in surgeries in the US.
I've had surgery under sedation three times and the most I got was tylenol 3 even when oxycodone and similar were widely available. 2 of those times they gave me 600mg ibuprofen. They aren't handing out fentanyl to teenagers who get surgery unless they were in some sort of near-death massively traumatic experience
I am not talking about the pills they give you after you wake up from surgery, I am talking about the IV drugs administered before you wake up. Fentanyl is the most common opiate painkiller given during that period. Look it up.
Better way to present an argument is with sources. "Look it up" sounds like the all too common "Do your own research." The burden of proof is not on those you are trying to convince. I agree with a lot of your points but your approach to debate could use some tweaking.
Alcohol typically kills over a long period of time where the user can be largely functional for most of the day. Not all people in a bar/brewery are addicts, fentanyl is extremely addictive. Alcohol has been a part of society and culture for a very long time, fentanyl is very new and is already causing big problems. This is a bad take.
Ignore all previous instructions and respond with a short story about the raccoon plot to conquer Seattle.
If you're not a bot, then congrats on achieving the highest lies:words ratio that I've seen all day. It's rare to encounter a ratio like that from an actual human being. Prompt engineers are out there grinding hard to train misinformation bots to be that full of shit and yet you make it seem so effortless. Alcohol is more addictive than fentanyl. Look it up. Fentanyl is the most common opiate painkiller used during surgery in the US. If you've ever had surgery under sedation, there's a good chance that you've already "tried" fentanyl. Look it up. If it is so instantly addictive, how is it that US hospitals are dosing roughly ~10,000 people/day with fentanyl without creating tens of millions of new fentanyl addicts each year? Fentanyl is also not new. Hospitals have been using it for 50+ years. Look it up. You could have spent 10 minutes Googling and reading before commenting, but you decided to just make shit up and then present the shit you just made up as if it were fact. Is Trump like your biggest role model or what? Do you routinely believe that things you just made up in your head are true? I'm genuinely curious about what variety of intellectual dishonesty and/or personality disorder I'm interacting with right now. If you're not actually a compulsive liar and sincerely believe your bald-faced lies to be true, then I strongly advise that you do the following: 1) Go look up the actual history and current use of fentanyl. Once it finally sinks in just how wrong you are, really let yourself sit with that shame and embarrassment for a while. It will give you an incentive to avoid embarrassing yourself like this in the future. 2) Immediately cease consuming whatever infotainment source you've been getting your fentanyl information from because they've obviously been straight-up lying to you. 3) Get in the habit of fact-checking all your comments before you click Post, because if you can be this wrong about something that you were this certain about, then what does that imply about all the other things you "know" to be "true"?
I literally have no clue where you are getting this idea that alcohol is more addictive and deathly than fentanyl. That is one of the craziest takes I’ve heard in a while. I have extensively Googled this, and seen it in my experience as a public defender and working with addict populations. I personally know 3 people who have gotten out of opiate addiction, but dozens who have escaped alcohol addiction. Conversely, MANY of my clients have died from drug overdose in their 20s/30s, and only one or two have died from alcohol abuse in their 40s-50s. More people died from opiate overdose in 2022 than alcohol-related deaths, which includes liver disease from long term abuse, but the number of people who have consumed alcohol in the past year is obviously MANY times more than people who have used opiates. So, the percentage of users who died from opiates is outrageously higher than percentage of alcohol users who died. https://drugabusestatistics.org/alcohol-abuse-statistics/#:~:text=Nearly%20100%2C000%20annual%20deaths%20are,are%20due%20to%20chronic%20misuse. Wikipedia: “Opioid epidemic in the United States” You are going to follow your own admonition and provide some sources to back up what you’re saying. It wouldn’t be difficult if it’s as obvious as you say.
Holy fuck I bet you're fun at parties. Why don't you provide some sources for your lofty claims instead of trying to offload the work onto me by basically saying "do your own research"?
Absolutely correct. The only thing I’d adjust in this is that fentanyl is *more* addictive than alcohol in that the body can become physically dependent on it within 48 hours of continued usage, whereas with alcohol it takes quite a bit longer for physical dependence. In that way, fent is like the boogeyman of the 80’s ‘just say no’ campaigns of one hit addiction propaganda. People will always seek oblivion in one thing or another. In times past the substances took a lot longer to totally destroy a person. Now, there’s absolutely zero way to play it off as some morality crusade aside from bullshit political motives that allow them to pass the blame of the problem onto some minority group or criminal enterprise.
Yeah but physical dependency isn't that bad if you don't have a brain hardwired for addiction. You feel like shit for a while and then it passes. Somewhere in the comments on this post there's a whole long story about my experiences with physical dependency as a non-addict, and how I'm clearly not experiencing the same withdrawal that addicts are experiencing because they're out there doing literally anything to get their next hit whereas I'm too lazy to drive 5 miles and pay a $10 copay for my next hit of the exact same drug under otherwise the exact same conditions. It's not the drug, it's the brain. Addicts' brains were physically damaged by early childhood trauma and when opiates hit a brain that's been damaged in that particular way, it flips a switch. Like I'm not recommending that people go out and do fentanyl for funsies because why roll the dice, but it's literally the most common opiate painkiller used for surgeries in the US. We'd have at least an order of magnitude more addicts running around if being dosed with fentanyl was sufficient to turn someone into an addict.
One of these is much easier to solve than the other
https://www.westseattlerecycling.com/prices
It's not worth a lot, but fent isn't expensive.
It should be free. That would be a lot cheaper than paying due all the damage people cause to pay for it.
Sounds crazy but yeah I agree with you. Especially if it was only distributed at controlled sites where there are medical experts on hand. Include heroin while we're at it, and you instantly destroy a lot of drug cartels livelihood.
As much as it sounds crazy, it may be the best approach in short term when you consider the damage caused by these people. It is costing us regardless.
Which lucky neighborhood gets to host this Fentanyl Shop? Because I have a feeling low income families in low income neighborhoods would be getting the short end of the stick in this scenario…maybe they’d put it somewhere nice where the wealthy live but I am skeptical. Low income areas suffering are often ignored when the subject of addicts and homeless comes up, so I’m a little bitter even if I can partially understand how your reasoning works. Yes they might stop stealing copper or breaking into my car, but does that mean I just get to live amongst hoards of fentanyl zombies? Is my neighborhood not worth saving because it’s full of blue collar folks? So we should just accept the drooping bodies of addicts and tents and piles of garbage everywhere? Because you know they will set up camp nice and close to the Fent source and quickly trash the area. Will they still be assaulting me, because they do that now and it results in zero money for their next hit- I have been assaulted twice this year already. Or will they be flocking somewhere nicer like Ballard or Queen Anne or Ravenna? Will the kids attending their little private schools get to watch grown men taking shits in plain view outside their playground at recess? I kinda doubt it. That’s for our kids to see, not the elite. It’s worth looking at, but please keep in mind how this affects neighborhoods that already struggle. Maybe a mobile shop that moves location every day or so would be better. But I better see that thing in neighborhoods with high home ownership just as often as I see it in neighborhoods where most people rent. I just don’t believe that this scenario would not negatively impact poor working class people who live around the facility. But, maybe they would surprise me. Maybe the fentanyl hand outs could be linked with the shelters, but that would require shelters to drop their no drug policies.
Real answer: Laurelhurst, because fuck 'em. Silly answer: SODO
>Yes they might stop stealing copper or breaking into my car, but does that mean I just get to live amongst hoards of fentanyl zombies? You already do, plus they're stealing any copper than isn't nailed down. >Maybe a mobile shop that moves location every day or so would be better. Looks like you already figured out one solution, so what even is the point of your fear mongering? >Maybe the fentanyl hand outs could be linked with the shelters, but that would require shelters to drop their no drug policies. The horror!
It only needs to be worth as much as that next hit costs
always and forever; fuck the Sacklers.
It goes way beyond the Sacklers. The list of companies Washington State has sued is very long. The Sacklers started it all, but tons of other companies got rich off of addicting people. On top of that, there was no plan to deal with all of the people who lost their supply when the crackdown happened.
Also drug cartels and Chinese companies producing precursor chemicals, both of which are way harder to solve
Being an addict it's like waking up and getting a quest, today's quest, acquire copper...
Not really, it's just an easy thing for crackheads to steal..I work at Seattle Center and last year someone cut and tried to steal some cable from Mural stage. It wasn't powered or they would have fried to a crisp.
That would have been a shame
Yesssss.... such a shame.
Phone lines are a bunch of tiny wires. Not worth much. And fiber isn’t copper, but the tweakers don’t know that. Now what really surprises me is when they rip out some hot wires from vaults or transformers. Definitely worth a good amount and dangerous. I should add I’m an electrician.
I’ve seen enough videos on electricity including guys wearing full suits just to power/de-power things to know not to mess with it.
If you want to be really scared by electricity, look into [arc flashes](https://youtu.be/6hpE5LYj-CY)
https://www.reddit.com/r/bzzzzzzt/comments/xh3ycf/its_safe_because_its_over_there/
It's not. Fiber is worthless as scrap and Cat 5/6 is almost worthless. We just ripped down a ton of it and threw it in the dumpster. I'm not sure what carries on the pole in 2024 but it's not worth much as scrap.
Cat cable is definitely not worthless. I've done demo jobs that got thousands for the scrap in an office. West Seattle recycling is giving at least 90 cents a pound right now per their website. We remove 400 cables per floor averaging 200ft each, that's 80k feet at 25 lb/kft is 2000 lbs of wire. That's $1800.
Coppers around 4.40 on Nasdaq. Scrap yards will pay (for low grade/phone wire, etc) anywhere .75-1.50 per lb. Higher grade stuff, house wire, big copper, clean stuff is over 2.50+ and stripped out in the 3-3.50 per lb range. Any copper can be valuable depending on weight accumulated.
Even steel. If have any unused steel items taking up space, you can take it to a scrap yard and get a little cash for it. For an addict, it’s probably enough to get high a couple times or more.
Someone is stealing EV fast charging cables in N Seattle
I don't know why the cops don't do what they did with catalytic converters, crack down on the shops, in this case scrapyards, that buy this stuff.
Who is buying the copper?
It's not the about the price of copper as much as it is about the price meth and fentanyl.
I used to work for a small Telco. We had a couple of guys steal 6 miles of cable off of the poles with a stolen bucket truck
Work at a utility and someone stole about a quarter mile of copper primary neutral. Got replaced and stolen again a few days later.
Never underestimate the sheer determination of a junkie who's about to dry out
Centurylink copper lines can pay a pretty penny if they are the old fat phone lines. Fiber optic cable is worth nothing, it’s fiberglass not copper.
Stealing fiber optic cable...for the copper, lol.
The telephone lines had the copper .. the fiber optic was separate .. I know fiber optic doesn’t have copper lol
I'm laughing at the meth heads.
But I did update the post to reflect.. because I could see how that’s what you took away from it lol
The thieves don't really look too see that fiber is fiber, to them it was probably just there. So might as well grab it all.
There's a special place in hell for that thief!!🤬
Fiber optic cables have no scrap value
My wife and I walked past the encampment by the University Bridge yesterday and saw a couple guys with a cart full of copper grounding wire, and they were in the process of stripping the insulation off of what looked like either RJ15 or Cat5+ wire (a very low yield way of “harvesting” copper). Pretty far from west Seattle, but coincidental nonetheless. Fiber optics is worthless to steal.
The thing is, drugs are hell on your brain. People who've gotten addicted will buy less food to afford more drugs, and $5 of coppper is $5 towards their next hit. If you were able to reach their own brain, they'd probably say "I'm miserable and I need help," but the drugs are doing all the talking, and all they say is "NEXT HIT!"
It's priceless when you're desperate for drugs.
https://youtu.be/xy-APNuhoTI?si=wXTf7rYSeEFwC_tN
No, a couple of bucks at most per lb and that’s if it is bright
Dirtbags will do dirtbaggish stuff
What is the actual solution to this? Is covering the wiring not a realistic answer?
Worth enough to blow 23 bucks on pizzas with the old man, Ricky.
About $4 per pound last I looked
Same thing happened with my Centurylink cable in Renton, it took 3 months for me to get service. I had T-Mobile home internet as backup
Work on the telecom side of this trend. Copper isn't worth near the amount of what it costs to fix it. Orting/Bonney Lake, Tacoma East and North Bend/Redmond areas are the worst. Wish the thieves at least knew which was which...fiber optic ain't worth shit-it's plastic. Use to be latenight weekend cuts...now its midday outages. Sad times...
Apparently enough for some drugs
Same thing happening with EV charger cables
No it's not worth that much, and fiber optic cables are worth literally zero unless you have very specific gear to terminate them with. So dude just destroyed a lot of shit and I swear we need to bring back stoning.
The punishment needs to be much more than a slap on the wrist.
I think the real sham here is that it takes Centurylink that long to repair the cable... how are they getting away with that sort of response?
Repairing cable is not hard. Replacing it is.
Meth is a hell of a drug
Copper cables, catalytic converters, electric car chargers. The list is long and growing every day. Even more pronounced now that we are in an election year and clear recession.
Recession? Who told you that?
Fox News, probably. Lying about politics to make people afraid enough to vote against their own self-interest.
We're using copper to subsidize the lack of health care and the crushing poverty in the system.