(Image: Sound Transit)
A University of Washington study of Seattle public transit in response to concerns about potential health risks to operators and riders found methamphetamine and fentanyl use is rampant on the city’s trains and buses but transit agencies say the results show it is safe to ride with “drug levels detected on public transportation extremely low.”
“Researchers detected methamphetamine in 98% of surface samples and 100% of air samples, while fentanyl was detected in 46% of surface and 25% of air samples,” the UW researchers report. “One air sample exceeded federal recommendations for airborne fentanyl exposure at work established by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.”
“No similar guidelines exist for airborne methamphetamine,” the summary notes.
The air and surface testing took place on trains and buses from four agencies including Sound Transit and King County Metro across 30 buses and train cars over 28 nights. “Transit lines and times were selected for sampling based on operator reports of observed drug use, with researchers targeting routes and runs when smoking events were most likely to occur,” UW says.
Air and surface samples were collected near operators and “in other areas of the vehicles where smoke was likely to accumulate” but riders and operators were not tested to detect “any level of secondhand fentanyl or methamphetamine in their bodies.”
The researchers say riders and operators probably don’t need to be concerned about the second hand smoke as no previous studies “demonstrated acute medical conditions resulting from passive exposure to fentanyl or methamphetamine at the levels seen in this study.”
While echoing those findings, the agencies say that “vehicle filtration system improvements” and improved cleaning protocols are already being planned.
The study, which has yet to be peer reviewed, was mounted to address concerns raised by operators and riders earlier this year and comes as agencies including Sound Transit have struggled with maintenance and safety under reduced staffing and recovering ridership.
You can read the full report on the UW study (PDF) here.
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Seems they need to test when someone is actively smoking in a bus, Link section, etc…and you cannot avoid the direct smoke from it. Such a stupid methodology. Just keep people off transit who are smoking anything!
Oh, great. Now I don’t have to worry about keeping the window open when the homeless guy who has adopted the front steps of my house as his fixing place shows up.
What a crock of doo-doo.
Why does this sound like an illogical conclusion to me… People heat this stuff up and inhale the vapors intentionally to get high. How would breathing it from a slight distance away be any different other than you are getting a lower dose??? It is in-freaking-sane that 100% of air samples had meth in them.. mind blowingly in-freaking-sane. We outlawed cigarette smoking in many places because it’s clearly dangerous to be breathing, to say it’s perfectly OK when it’s far worse substances is mind boggling.
Sorry – I would like to be able to expect that I can ride transit and get ZERO meth or fentanyl exposure thank you… And no, better ventilation is not the answer. There should be no tolerance for this.
“Probably don’t need to be concerned”
Mmhmmm. Probably should be more done to prevent it on trains and buses in the first place.
Yes, I was struck by the way the researchers avoided the elephant in the room. Increased enforcement of the ban on any kind of smoking on transit should have made the list, too.
A little bit of meth is ok
Why don’t recommendations include “Preventing people from using illegal substances on public transportation”?
Note, that among the recommendation in the UW study one cannot find “enforce the law, such that paying transit users can use transit safely and comfortably.”
Sooner or later we hit the tipping point where no one who has an option is going to use transit (I say this with foreboding, not glee: I am a dedicated Metro rider).
I think we’re kind of there now. My 17yr old refuses to use the light rail and would rather wait hours for a ride to his best friends’ house, even tho both live easy walking distance from light rail stops…the crime is his reason…
If these levels of meth are found in a hotel room they call in a hazmat unit to clean it. It strains credibility that cigarette and vape are not allowed on a bus or light rail but smoking meth or fent are. This is a political statement to not enforce against drug smokers more than a statement of credible public health.
It’s a microcosm of Seattle now. How dare you smoke a cigarette or vape on this train?! Oh I’m sorry I didn’t realize it was a glass pipe or foil filled with fentanyl or meth, carry on sir. Some of these Bleeding hearts think drugs are ok but they are not in a setting like a train.
Is this true, or imagined? You think they test hotel rooms for surface meth regularly and call hazmat units in? I’ve never heard of this practice.
Imagined. As someone who works in a high end hotel here in the city, this never happens. And people smoke EVERYTHING in the rooms and no one cares. Air purifiers and Ozium are about as far as we go.
It is actually a thing.. though smoking can do it, I believe that it’s more often meth cooking that causes the most contamination
https://www.denverpost.com/2013/05/31/meth-busters-checks-hotels-for-residue/
https://www.heraldnet.com/news/meth-contamination-stalls-shelter-projects-at-edmonds-everett-motels/
Mount Vernon hotel closed after meth contamination found …The Seattle Timeshttps://www.seattletimes.com › nation-world › mount-ver…
Struggle to close down contaminated Burlington motel …https://www.seattletimes.com › Local News › Northwest
Meth contamination in hotel leads to wider city discussion …Midvale Journalhttps://www.midvalejournal.com › 2021/04/15 › meth…
Sedro-Woolley shutters meth-contaminated motel …Go Skagithttps://www.goskagit.com › news › local_news › sedro-…
Longmont, Colorado Motel Condemned From Meth …99.9 The Pointhttps://999thepoint.com › colorado-hotel-confirmed-c…
What’s insane is that this study’s recommendations don’t include steps to reduce the amount of meth and fentanyl smoked on public transit. By all means, give transit workers counseling, but let’s also give them the ability to have anyone smoking anything removed from the bus or train car. And give the substance abuse disorder sufferers counseling and treatment too—they need it.
Maybe these amounts are safe for adults without preexisting conditions but what about young children/babies and the elderly? Seems like we might want to err on the side of caution and keep smoke out of their air at the risk of inconveniencing Seattle’s substance abuse disorder. And doesn’t Seattle Public Schools direct kids to take public transit in the absence of a functioning school bus system?
It would only be kicking the can down the street but what if transit actually enforced fare payment? Crazy idea, I know, but I doubt many of the smokers would buy a ticket in order to use the bus/train car as a hotbox. And since these people absolutely have to smoke meth and fentanyl, probably better to have it in the open air than in closed compartments.
Embrace urbanist realities: Light rail is an ideal affordable housing solution and regulating what people can and cannot do in their homes is unacceptable.
This is fucking ridiculous, it’s a bad joke, a scene from Portlandia where Carrie and Fred are the researchers on public transportation getting high on meth and fentanyl while writing up their findings and “recommendations”. This is one of the reasons I don’t take public transportation anymore. Just pathetic Seattle, but keep spending millions on building those bus lanes and trains to carry around all those drug users smoking meth and fentanyl.
“Hey guys, yeah there’s fentanyl and meth smoke lingering in Seattle’s public transportation but don’t worry, it’s safe. Also, here’s some progressive buzz speak about people experiencing addiction and the temporarily unhoused so you know we’re good people. Oh and we don’t really have a plan to do anything about said smoke but as we noted earlier, it’s safe.”
This is just more evidence that we need to get alot tougher on addicts and what they are doing to our common environment, both inside and outside transit.
Make no mistake – the people who make policy in this city, and the universities, non-profits, and think tanks who do these studies, have a very clear view.
They think people who smoke meth and fent on buses are better than you. Yes, you.
Why else would they approach the issue this way? It’s the only rational explanation.
Lmao, youre nuts if this is your self soothing takeaway
It’s not soothing in the least!
And if I’m wrong, I welcome your explanation. Why are hard drug users held to such a lower standard than everyone else?
Because yall are a bunch of non controntational babies and the legal users of legal drugs are basically not outside society and generally follow rules around usage because of societal and state legitimation of their use and the consequences of not following them. Generally, but not always, like Ive waded through clouds of Cotton Candy Razzamatazz vape a couple of times on the 10 a d 49.
For real, if you had even a little bit of insight into this, you wouldnt come up with baffling favortism arguments that are pretty much explained by paradigms you support and want even more of
Because we’ve begun treating addiction as a disability and being able to smoke or shoot up your drugs wherever you want and do whatever you need (ie – steal stuff) to obtain them to as “reasonable accommodations”…
Was a silly story. This is in line with “the air contains dust” level of nonsense. Of COURSE there are ‘traces’ of drugs on public transit (or any public area). This is true of ANY bus/train you test ANYWHERE in the United States. Hey, remember this? Did you forget your money has cocaine on it?
https://www.acs.org/pressroom/newsreleases/2009/august/new-study-up-to-90-percent-of-us-paper-money-contains-traces-of-cocaine.html
hey everyone, it’s long past time to quit allowing leftwing bully gasligters like David to abuse you
Hows that gonna work, youll log off and venture out of the house to find us and then call the cops?
The difference is, we breathe the air. We don’t eat the money. Also, fentanyl and meth are worse for you than cocaine is.
We handle money and food. Traces of contaminants in the former do reach our digestive system. Fentanyl and meth are dangerous in lethal doses. People aren’t getting “high” from these traces.
When did this town become so so so so scared of every single thing? Get a spine!
You know so many in the comments here credulously believe cops OD from being within 5 feet of fentanyl so of course theyre white knuckle gripping about trace amounts
woke public health: tobacco bad, meth and fenty good
Right, perfectly safe and normal. Give me a break.
I ride the train and bus near daily and never gotten any issue from fent or meth. Jeeze you people are fragile.
It’d be nice to have the option to choose for myself if I want to be around that crap. So what you are saying is that drug use on public transit is no problem? Has nothing to do with “fragile”.
Congratulations on your healthy lungs, on not being a newborn, child, pregnant woman, elderly, compromised health, or recovering addict. Some people are LITERALLY fragile, you nitwit.
Personally, I will continue to take the bus and train. But reports like this, with their laughable “recommendations” that don’t include removing the drug users, fuel the average person’s perception that Seattle transit is dangerous. As an urbanist, I’m afraid we will lose most public support for transit if the perception continues that it is a drug den and rolling homeless shelter rather than an important government service for a growing city.
You’ll still be left with the perception that public transit is the urbanists’ favorite vehicle for gentrification.
The city and county just aren’t concerned about drug use or the public’s exposure to it. There is no use in thinking they are going to do anything to curb the drug problem other than to sit back and report the number of overdoses. This is crazy!
All these comments are pretty silly – it’s not the bus driver’s job to boot someone from the bus, so who’s gonna kick off a meth or fentanyl smoker? Do you want the bus driver to stop as you wait for a police officer to show up or are you just gonna open the little window vents and deal with it? I ride the bus, and haven’t seen anyone smoking on it. Definitely lots of sketch, and crazies.
Is this why I’ve been getting an instant headache when I take the First Hill streetcar to the point where I have to get off because the smell is so bad? Can passengers die from this inhalation? Jeez.
This is bullsh*t. I had to evict a drug addict from our remodel porta-potty, and caught a whiff of something acrid, through the door. My nose went numb, and I did start to feel a tiny bit high (not an unpleasant feeling, just didn’t ask for it). Through a door.
Thing is, these drugs were never formulated to be smoked, and esp the fillers they use to make the cheap pills. So some of the ill feeling experienced second hand might not be from the fentanyl/meth itself, but from the filler smoke. I think it’s also part of the extreme physical degradation seen among so many foil smokers. I haven’t seen this addressed, and it should be.
Addiction is a horrible thing, and I understand there are no easy or perfect answers to deal with the current epidemic. But every addict I’ve known will take and take and take until they hit rock bottom, and then they either turn their lives around, or finally od for the last time. Enabling rarely does any good, and this study is just another example of it, imo.
Did anyone actually bother to read the report, right in the executive summary: “It is also recommended that agencies continue to work with state and county health agencies to address the use of controlled substances on transit.”
We need to work with the police to address the illegal activity that is putting public health at risk, not more coddling of addicts for “harm reduction”.
We don’t need coddling, but we do need to treat this like a public health issue and not a criminal one. People aren’t throwing away their lives on fentanyl for shits and giggles, and there will always be addiction and those seeking to make money and take advantage of those with addiction. We need to work to reduce the amount of people seeking these options for escape, create better systems to help people get out of addiction, and do more to hold those accountable who prey on addicts with dangerous drugs and in myriad other ways…