My knack for cleaning things up has led to an interesting profession.

Welcome to Tweakerville

Introduction

I don’t know if it’s an obsession with keeping a place organized, or the challenge of solving the problem of how to decide what to keep and what to throw away, but even when I was a kid I would go through periodic phases of throwing everything out of my room that I didn’t need. I had to purge the dead weight. Even when I was traveling in Europe, I would end up at odd jobs that involved clearing out junk from houses and properties. The most massive clusterfuck of a hoarder I have ever worked on was on a property in Klosterneuburg outside of Vienna, Austria. I was on a team that literally took months to just get the junk and garbage out.

I got so good at cleaning places up I decided to start a business with a long-time friend in early 2017. I never would have guessed, but garbage is like gold. The amount of money people are willing to pay to get rid of garbage and junk is incredible. We've been doing a good business servicing the I-5 corridor north of Seattle all the way to Skagit County. You can check out our business page here:

AD HAULING SOLUTIONS, LLC WEBSITE

But what is even more incredible is the type of junk you will find. As our property cleanup business picked up, we started to notice a pattern in a certain type of cleanup: the debris left behind by drug addicts. For the sake of this article, when I refer to drugs, I talking the hard stuff: heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines, methadone, and the like. I don’t know how ubiquitous the term is, but up in Washington State, we use the term tweaker to refer to people who have ruined their lives on these drugs. It’s not politically correct. It offends a lot of people. Good. I want you to be offended by what you see in this article. It will help you see some of the real effects of drug problem this country is facing.

You Begin Your Adventure in Tweakerville

This story starts with Everett, Washington, known as Tweakerville by locals:

Prior to the 2017 general Snohomish County elections, a business owner in Everett by the name of Gary Watts used his electronic business sign to read Welcome to TweakerVille – Everett, WA. The message on the sign erupted into controversy—which is exactly what Watts wanted. Everett has been a tweaker epicenter for several years, largely due to the methadone clinic in downtown Everett which hands out free methadone to any addict who asks for it.

The problem has gotten so bad that cleanup efforts of tweaker camps produce mountains of used needles. I’m not joking. Check out this pile of needles from a cleanup effort:

Need a closer look at that?
Article source.

Everett is so infested with tweakers (often referred to as “Everett’s finest” by the locals), that Watts finally had enough. In addition to his Tweakerville readerboard, he installed a TweakerCam pointed at where the tweakers like to congregate outside of the methadone clinic. In fact, it’s still running in real time. You can watch what the tweakers in Everett are doing this second here.

(TweakerCam stillshot: image outside of Everett methadone clinic.)

It will get boring quick. They don’t do much.

The general frustration with the tweakers has gotten so immense, that Watts used the controversy as an opportunity to run for Mayor of Everett. Watts pointed out (rightly so, I think) that several city council members had been incumbent for many years and weren’t coming up with any useful solutions, that somebody new had to get in there and do something. Watts was late to the election, so he had to settle for being a write-in. You can watch his campaign video here:

With no political experience, no real plan, coming in late as a write-in, and running almost exclusively on an anti-tweaker platform, Watts was able to acquire 11.82% of the votes for mayor. Shit, if I lived in Everett, I would have voted for him. The only thing “no political experience” says to me is “no previous experience with corruption”. Good enough for me. Apparently it was good enough for many others, too.

2017 Everett Mayor Election Results

Despite Everett carrying the iconic torch as being one big, gaping tweaker hole, the problem goes much beyond Everett. Moving south towards the more populated areas of Washington, the city of Seattle itself is rapidly becoming known as a giant homeless camp. Tent villages are appearing in almost any place they can fit, the favorite being under freeways and bridges.

Under the freeway in Seattle. Bicyclist reportedly attacked here. Source.

Look how great tweakers are for the environment. Might as well be in Haiti. Source.

Friends I have in Seattle have complained that they will get a fine from the city if they have an unclean yard, but public property is openly allowed to get infested with tweakers and their tent cities. In fact, it’s rewarded. The City of Seattle provides housing, food, and free drugs to these people, and has an official website for information about their “sanctioned encampments”. Check it out: https://www.seattle.gov/homelessness/sanctioned-encampments

My Story with Tweakers

As for me, I avoid Seattle like the plague. Not just because of the tweaker activity and homeless camps. The traffic alone is enough to make you contemplate suicide and everyone there seems to be a passive-aggressive dick. Everything is all tolerance and love until it isn’t.

For me, I stick to the northern end of the I-5 corridor when I can. Gorgeous mountains, lush green trees, incredible valleys, views of the sound and islands, and so many rivers and streams you can’t throw a rock without hitting one. Also less passive-aggressive bullshit from the populace compared with Seattle. However, the tweaker problem is still real, just more hidden. Because we’re mainly out in rural areas, and because evergreen trees like cedars are excellent at keeping properties private, I never had any idea as I drove down backroads through the woods how many properties have been turned into landfills.

Landfills? I thought we were talking about tweakers. Allow me to explain.

Fine tweaker livin’ up past Marblemount, Washington:

I don’t know what the statistics would be on this, but my personal experience has taught me that if a tweaker has the space to do it, he will become a hoarder. And never a hoarder of anything valuable. A tweaker will collect anything: cars, trailers, clothes, VHS tapes, kitchen accessories, tires, bricks, rocks, pool tables, bicycles, propane tanks and heaters, ducting, Christmas trees, clothes, mattresses and box springs, TVs, actual garbage, car parts, toilets, pipes, coolers, combs, barbeques, porn, clothes, refrigerators, mostly-empty paint cans, full paint cans, sewing machines, porcelain figurines, plastic totes, dryers and washing machines, space heaters, lawn chairs, couch cushions, garbage bags full of clothes, tools boxes filled with things other than tools, clothes, arrest warrants and public fines, bath tubs, shower stalls, water heaters, stripped electrical cords, stuffed animals, empty chemical bottles, full chemical bottles, air conditioners, car seats, lawn mowers and weed whackers, metal roofing, and clothes. Did I mention that tweakers like to hoard clothes? They definitely like to hoard clothes.

The worst part about this is you have to assume there are needles sticking out of all of it. Unfortunately, that’s often the case.

Camano Island Tweaker Pad

Sedro-Woolley Tweaker Resort

Sedro-Woolley Tweaker Antique Car Collection

None of the stuff is ever good. Ever. No vehicles run, all the electronics are broken, and anything that has multiple parts is always missing the vital ones. Even if an item was good at one point, it has been so permeated with mold and rat urine that instinctively you know you would be cursed for taking it home. Tweaker-cursed.

They won’t pay the bills so the water and power will have been turned off for months, sometimes even years. Mold will have completely saturated the structure and the tweakers will be living side-by-side with the rats. Because they can’t flush the toilet they will find somewhere outside to use as the bathroom. They will invite their tweaker friends over who will eventually get kicked out of where they’re living and move in, so the hoarding acceleration will intensify. Eventually the roof will leak so the contents of the house won’t just mold, they will rot. Often the kitchen will be burned out. Slowly the house will get so full and so disgusting that the inhabitants will have to move into a trailer on the property. Eventually, the house will be foreclosed on, or the inhabitants evicted (or simply arrested), and it falls upon the new owner or the bank to clean it up, often under threat of suit by the county.

(People were still living in this property when we found it.)

Want a closer look? Here is a video I took of a property before we cleaned it up in Skagit County:

(Note: You obviously can’t pick up the smell from the video. The inside of the house smelled so badly of rats you could hardly breathe. The only reason I wasn’t wearing a respirator was because I wasn’t disturbing anything. Also! You can check out my Youtube channel here.)

When I was young, I remember seeing those commercials where a woman would hold an egg saying, “This is your brain.” She would smash the egg with a frying pan and say, “This is your brain on drugs.” I’m thinking of taking before and after pics of the next house we do so I can make a meme saying, “This is your house. This is your house on drugs.” Drugs will take a property and turn it into a toxic garbage heap. It’s unreal.

There really isn’t a way to properly describe in words how awful it is to go through one of these cesspits. However, I’m going to try.

Your instinct upon first sight is to say, “How can anybody live like this?!” I said it, my business partners have said it, every person we’ve ever met on the jobsite has said it. As you get closer and begin to notice the expanse of the awfulness, you will turn that phrase into a mantra. “How can anyone live like this? How can anyone live like this?! Seriously! How do you not die living like this?”

As the smell of rats and mold hit you, you say, “Oh my god, this is the most disgusting thing I have ever seen in my life.” It’s not hyperbole. You mean it.

As your continue your quest through Tweakerdom, you uncover something more horrible. You find the actual rat nest, the remaining remains of the latrine, the liquified meat in the fridge; you say, “Oh my god, THIS is the most disgusting thing I have ever seen in my life!” Again, it’s not hyperbole. You mean it.

This happens over, and over, and over. There is no bottom to the Tweaker Abyss that the bar of standards can settle upon. It’s like a acid trip calculus problem where you experience “the most disgusting thing you have ever seen in your life” an infinite number of times within the span of a half hour.

My brother-in-law came to see the extent of one of our jobs. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll find a dead body in this?” he asked.

Actually… yes. Yes we are.

The Opiate Crisis

You may be surprised to hear this, but I support legalizing all drugs. I’ve done enough homework on the subject to know that prohibition always makes things worse. It opens the doors for corruption and gang violence, addiction and usage rates always go up (the numbers back this up), and there is no way to regulate the black market product. A common issue, even among pot smokers, is that you never actually know what you’re buying or how potent it is. Furthermore, because transportation is such a huge issue with illegal substances, there are MASSIVE incentives to make the drugs as potent as possible. The stronger the drugs are, the less space they take up, which means they’re easier to conceal during transport.

The history of the drug trade, particularly with opiates from the golden crescent of the middle east and the golden triangle, is wrought with conspiracies and government involvement in drug trades. Human society has simply been unable to come to grips with the fact that drugs are just worth so much damn money during prohibition. I remember listening to a documentary, I believe it was from BBC, that the opium trade made up ONE FIFTH of the entire British economy sometime during the 19th century. Gives a little context to the Opium Wars, doesn’t it?

The Golden Crescent and Triangle. Source.

Thus whenever I hear the government yakking away about how the “War on Drugs” or some other problem-exacerbating government program, I generally roll my eyes and take it as propaganda intended to keep the illicit trade going. But after I’ve seeing first-hand, I’m not taking it as a joke when President Trump announces a state of emergency for the opiate crisis. He. Ain’t. Fuckin’. Joking.

What’s worse is drugs like heroin, methamphetamines, and cocaine are becoming the drugs for wimps.

When I was young I loved reading the sci-fi books by Alan Dean Foster. He wrote the book Bloodhype, which was a story that involved a drug called bloodhype which was so addictive and toxic it would kill you within 72 hours of first use. It was produced by the hyperion tree on some planet, and the drug became such a problem that the galactic government solved it by eradicating all hyperion trees off the planet. I remember thinking as a kid, “Wow. That’s a wild imagination right there! Good thing this is just science fiction.”

Not anymore. Fentanyl and carfentanil are the two new big opiates on the block.

Fentanyl (Wikipedia Article)

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid discovered in the 1960s, considered a safe and effective pain medication and anesthetic. It’s 50 times as strong as heroin. Sounds great right? Like all medicine, everything is about dosage. Turn it into a street drug and you have a substance capable of causing overdose on contact with the skin. Police across the country are being informed not to touch any white substances because they might come in contact with fentantyl.

Read about an example here:Police officer accidental overdose from touching white powder on his shirt without realizing it..

Sound bad? Just wait. Carfentanil weighs in at 5,000 the strength of heroin and has toxic effects so powerful that governments are starting to worry about its use in chemical warfare and terrorist attacks. Readily commercially available from Chinese pharmaceutical companies.

Carfentanil Wikipedia Article

I may have to contradict myself here. Can we please ban these chemicals and eradicate the hyperion trees that produce them from the face of the earth? Oh, that’s right. They’re synthesized. Shit.

Compassion vs. Enablement

I know I’ve taken a very strong tone throughout this article against tweakers, and I’m sure many will find it distasteful. Tweakers are people, too, they’ll tell me. Tweaker Lives Matter. I agree. Kinda.

Whatever has happened to these people that has led them to choose lives of drug addicts is awful. I’m grateful never to have to have thought my life was so horrible that I would need to fix the problem with meth or heroin. However, when it comes down to it, drugs are a choice. Calling drug addiction a disease is putting a drug user in a position where he is never responsible for his own actions. While it may feel like compassion to not be stern with these people and encourage them to go through the pain of withdrawal, it isn’t. Building methadone clinics for drug addicts to get free hits whenever they want not only is destructive to the community and the land, it is destructive to the drug addicts themselves.

I'm wary about “treatment facilities”. I’ve been criticized for by others claiming that because I don’t support methadone clinics, I don’t want treatment for drug addicts.

Giving a heroin addict methadone to deal with his addiction whenever he asks for it is like giving a smoker a pack of cigarettes whenever he asks for it. It may alleviate the immediate discomfort for his withdrawals and your immediate discomfort for having to tell him no, but it’s a long-term course for destruction. It’s enabling. The actual compassionate thing to do is to not give the addict the drugs.

Think about it. If your best friend came over to your house one day and announced that he started taking heroin, what would you do about it? Drive him to the clinic to get clean needles? Help heat up his spoon? Give him a safe place to trip and crash? No! You would lambaste him up and down like the idiot he is, and knock his ass out if you needed to, and even tie him up in order to take the drugs away and destroy them. Why? Because he’s your best friend and your compassion for him compels you to. If you didn't, you would be enabling him.

Why is this problem getting worse?

Honestly, I don't know. I remember after the crash of 2008 reading more and more articles about homeless cities popping up all over the country. Hard times can be hard. There were a lot of people losing their homes and jobs at that time. However, economic conditions have improved and the real estate market has had time to shake out and recover, banks are lending again, and yet the tweaker problem stays on the rise.

I can, however, connect dots. While the tweaker problem seems to be bad everywhere, they appear to openly bad in democrat controlled areas. Seattle is a cesspool of tweakerdom, and I'm reading more and more reports coming out of California that there are some places with miles of homeless camps. One number I read is that the total number of “unsheltered” in California is around 114,000.

Homeless camp in California (Source.)

My opinion is that tweakers are simply another "oppressed group" that power-hungry neoliberal politicians can exploit to stick more laws and regulations up your ass, and steal your money in the process. You might not like my politics when I say this, but I can't overlook the prevalence of homeless cities out in the open and the free handing-out of methadone in democrat controlled areas. It's like they're privileged citizens you're not allowed to cast your shadow on. If a politician or a bureaucrat can claim you're oppressing some defenseless someone, they can pass laws against you to protect them. That's essentially what we're seeing.

Solutions?

First is recognition of the problem. Until I started cleaning up after these people, I really didn't understand how bad it was and how these drugs destroy a person. Even after I saw it once, I didn't realize how bad it was until I started seeing it over and over.

Second is understanding that, even if times are hard for them, drug addiction is a choice. They chose to put themselves in the lives that they're in. They need to choose to get out of it.

Third is to understand it is not compassionate to just hand out methadone to these people. It is keeping them in the hell that they've gotten stuck in.

Fourth is understanding the nature of addictions. I'm not talking about the difference between chemical and psychological addiction, either. Something like 80% of people who try chemically addicting drugs don't become addicts. The problem is that people who are unable to maintain proper neurotransmitters like serotonin to feel good, happy, or even normal, will feel normal for the first time upon trying drugs. What's worse, is when they crash after the drug wears off, they crash hard. A person who can regulate his neurotransmitters more or less properly will have a hangover, get over it, and get back to work. The other person will need to take the drug again just to feel normal. The nail in the coffin is the diminishing effects of the drug—because a person will develop a resistance to the drug they're taking, he will need heavier and heavier doses of drugs to feel the same high. Before long you have an addict. What causes this inability to regulate neurotransmitters? Adverse childhood experiences and single motherhood.

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs - website) are stressful or traumatic events, including abuse and neglect. They may also include household dysfunction such as witnessing domestic violence or growing up with family members who have substance use disorders. ACEs are strongly related to the development and prevalence of a wide range of health problems throughout a person’s lifespan, including those associated with substance misuse.

ACEs include:

Physical abuse
Sexual abuse
Emotional abuse
Physical neglect
Emotional neglect
Intimate partner violence
Mother treated violently
Substance misuse within household
Household mental illness
Parental separation or divorce
Incarcerated household member

Excellent resources for getting more information about ACEs and how they relate to addiction is here:

Free Domain Radio: The Truth About Addiction

Free Domain Radio: The Bomb in the Brain

Single motherhood. Statistically speaking, a child growing up without a father has a much greater chance of substance abuse and of homelessness. Saying this out loud will garner you all sorts of shit from single mothers who are unwilling to admit they chose to have children with low quality men, but the statistics are there and I’m going to say it anyway. One of the most destructive things you can do to a child’s development is to raise him or her without a father. Drug addiction is one of the many, many negative behavioral correlations associated with growing up without a father.

More information: https://thefatherlessgeneration.wordpress.com/statistics/

This is a long-term problem that ultimately lies on rebuilding the healthy family unit. I won’t go into arguments and evidence of why the family unit is doing so badly today in the West (that would be enough for a whole other article), but I will suffice to say it here and hope the reader goes forth to his his own research.

Conclusion:

A line from The Godfather comes to mind when I write about this subject. When all the dons are meeting and discussing whether or not they should allow the trade of drugs in their cities, Don Zaluchi stands up and says,

“I also don't believe in drugs. For years I paid my people extra so they wouldn't do that kind of business. Somebody comes to them and says, "I have powders; if you put up three, four thousand dollar investment -- we can make fifty thousand distributing." So they can't resist. I want to control it as a business, to keep it respectable. I don't want it near schools -- I don't want it sold to children! That's an infamia. In my city, we would keep the traffic in the dark people -- the colored. They're animals anyway, so let them lose their souls...”

Zaluchi hits the nail right on the head in the end. These substances take your souls—they abscond with your ability to choose. A human’s ability to choose, and thus his ability to access moral behavior, is tied inextricably with our ability think and to reason with the more advanced circuitry of our brains. Heavy drug use shuts down these abilities. It turns humans back into animals obsessed only with their base nature’s need for another drug dose.

Thanks for reading and become more aware of the problem in our backyard. This is a serious issue and it needs serious attention.

-Dylan Lawrence Moore

Follow, re-steem, and share. Thanks!
Subscribe to me on Youtube!