How to deal with a crack head

[paulpablo]

In some parts of this thread you seem quite naive, like in the bits where you're having your stuff stolen and this obvious crack addicted prostitute is living with you.

In other parts of the thread you sound like chuck Norris, it's crazy you ended up having a gun pulled on you and you wrestled with this person, your adrenaline must have been through the roof.

I've had to deal with a much less extreme situation involving a friend who became a speed addict. I think if you're wise you definitely learn from that sort of experience, not necessarily just with drug addicts but manipulators and users in general.

[Rahul]

A person I know has an ex-husband that's a druggy. Hearing updates about him is like Breaking Bad but more depressing. The dude hooked up with a craigslist hooker and they became an item. He had a nice house that his parents bought for him but he took out a mortgage on it for drug money, then fell behind on the payments, and then moved to a trailer down by the river in a flood plain. Crappy, water damaged, run down trailer with a herd of feral cats living under it. His girlfriend kept turning tricks for money until she OD'ed and died. Whenever he went to the bank to pull out the last of his money the tellers would be freaked out because he always looked like warmed over death. Scrawny, pale, and shaking like a leaf. One time she went over to his place to talk to him and he was sitting in a run down shed behind his trailer. Just sitting there staring at nothing. He had flies crawling all over his face and around his eyes and he wouldn't even try to brush them off. Freaking crazy. I feel sorry for their son.

[TaraJo]

In some parts of this thread you seem quite naive, like in the bits where you're having your stuff stolen and this obvious crack addicted prostitute is living with you.

At first I was willing to get along with her.  I mean, Nikki is trans like me, so I figured she was just another trans woman who's having a rough time because I've seen a lot of us go through that.  Hell, I've been through that myself.  That was when Lee and I were trying to help her do things like get an ID, get a job, get her birth certificate or drive her on errands.  It didn't take long for me to figure out she doesn't want to get her life together.  What, say, two or three months in I had figured out she was bad news; if it was even that long.  She was actually a tolerable roommate at first, but she got progressively worse.  Then there's Violet.  She was head of household on the lease and as far as Nikki goes, she stretched the benefit of the doubt like it was the unholy love child between Reed Richards and Monkey D Luffy.  Our stuff turned up missing, she said she didn't know what happened to it.  We found our stuff in her room, she said "well, you got it back so problem's solved, right?"  Our food gets eaten and she plays dumb.  She didn't want any conflict in the apartment and she seemed willing to put up with some extreme discomfort to keep the apartment conflict free.

[brewer]

There are far worse things than cannabis. I estimate a 24 hour round of the finest weed can't comprnsate for that 5 second flash while pushing the plunger in. And even when you know its killing you and your friends, all you want is to feel better again. Its a deadly spiral, that I GTFO in time. Sometimes I still dream of using again after 15 years. Ain't gonna happen. I would rather die.

You need to stop. When reading that my little monster peeked it's head out and said "Ya Buddy!". 

Not sure if I'll ever keep it completely locked away.

[CapnAwesome]

I would have bailed so much earlier. How to deal with crackheads? You don't.

[Fireball]

What a horrific thing to go through. Like Tres Leches says, wear gloves. A word of caution. If there are residual drugs in/on anything, be careful of how you dispose of it; you might get in trouble for disposing of hazardous waste incorrectly. If the police didn't seem too wound up over this situation, maybe you can ask the fire department to help with disposal. If they don't actually do it, they will know who can. The last thing you need is to get in trouble when cleaning up her mess.

[LastPoet]

I would have bailed so much earlier. How to deal with crackheads? You don't.

One can't help an addict. Only we can help ourselves. It sounds easy, right?

[TaraJo]

I would have bailed so much earlier. How to deal with crackheads? You don't.

One can't help an addict. Only we can help ourselves. It sounds easy, right?

This.  Exactly.  You can help people if they really want to fix their lives, but if they have no intention of doing that, you can't force it.  Remember the old line about how you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink?  It applies and junkies like this are going to destroy your lives too, if you try to help them when they aren't willing to help themselves.

So far, I haven't found anything especially toxic in there.  Fumes were sucked into fabric of the clothes and blankets and pillows in there, but that's probably the worst in there.  Now that we threw a lot of that away, the room, while still incredibly smelly is much more tolerable.  We still gotta get enough money to get a carpet shampooer, find a way to clean the stink out of the walls (I've heard scrubbing with amonia can work) and probably put some kind of deodorizer like activated charcoal in there.  Then we pray; or we would, if we thought praying would accomplish anything.

She has a decent couch in there and I might want to try to salvage it.  Ordinarly, I wouldn't dream of keeping that couch, but before our cat died, she had an unfortunate habit of using the couch as her littler box on an almost daily basis.  So we have to choose between a couch that smells like cat pee or a couch that smells like crack.  Which one do you think would be easier to clean?