By Sean Sullivan Lagniappe columnist

I’m a pretty lasseiz faire kind of guy. Live and let live I say. I have a “don’t bother me and I won’t bother you” worldview. My perfect world involves people not interfering in the lives of others. This is why the crack and meth heads and I now have a problem.

Hey crack heads, I don’t want to control your lives, hey meth heads I don’t want to have the government act as your parental authority, but damn it you give me no other choice. Why can’t you act right and quit bothering folks?

I’d have no beef with you if you could keep to yourselves but you can’t and therefore we have to use force to make you sit on your hands. I’m also worried about today’s junkies, they just don’t seem to have the same get-to-it-tiv-ness of previous generations of the strung-out. In the good old days addicts showed some creativity and effort in their criminal endeavors; now the hustlers are apathetic and couldn’t come up with a new way to get money for drugs if they tried.

That apathy along with a swelling in a particular semi precious metal’s value over the last 10 years leads us to where we are today with crack and meth heads scavenging copper from anywhere they can find it and that could even keep a listless junkie busy because copper is all around us, heck it is even in us! The element Cu (copper) is a component of human blood, but before any addicts out there try to sell their blood at the smelting plant versus the blood bank there is not enough copper in all your 10 pints to buy a hit.

Copper is also in coins like pennies and nickels, it is in doorknobs and frying pans, calculators and a myriad of other pedestrian items, but luckily for those items their copper content is so low that they don’t often get stolen. Other items aren’t so lucky, especially copper wire and copper pipe and that is where my big problem with you junkies starts. They must have passed out a memo a few years ago at some junkie convention that said you could make big money by selling copper, and with that meth-laden fatwa, wire and tubing started disappearing all over America.

Here in the 2-5-1 copper has been stolen everywhere from factory supply yards to train tracks to electrical substations and finally from air-conditioning units. It is the a/c unit thing that has awakened the giant in my case. Number one, my love of and reverence for conditioned air makes me a concerned party to these thefts and secondly when thieves stole the copper wire out of the a/c units at the Dumas Wesley center, I figured I had to do something.

The theft of copper at the Dumas Wesley center, which is a charity group helping all kinds of folks in Mobile, put a lot of children who were in the facilities’ daycare in scorching rooms last week and that straight up pissed me off. So with that anger and my love of the show “Deadliest Catch” I came up with a solution. So get ready my thieving strung out friends because here is what I have in mind.

Crack traps! I could have called them meth traps but it just wouldn’t have the same ring; although my traps will work equally well for either kind of addict. The crack trap is a straight copy of a good ol’ crab trap. While scaled up in size, the same principles that make the crab trap so successful in giving me the makings of a West Indies Salad will help us round up the wads of copper stealing criminals shuffling along the streets of Mobile.

The crack trap will be made out of heavy duty chain link and measure approximately 20’ by 15’, although we could have bigger models for areas with high junkie numbers. It would have a trap door that could be pushed open to go in but couldn’t be opened from the inside. In the middle of the trap there would be the bait station. Just like the canister in the middle of a crab trap, where we stuff speckled trout heads or chicken necks, serves to lure in the crabs in, in the crack trap it would be a table covered with an assortment of crack and meth plus any paraphernalia needed to do these drugs to lure in the junkies. I figure we can get a supply of “drug bait” from police seizures and then transfer those same drugs to our traps to catch us a box full of junkie criminals.

The city could distribute and pick up the traps with a flatbed truck/ crab boat hybrid vehicle. The harvester truck would have a driver and crew and would be outfitted with a boom crane swinging a hook to catch the top of the crack trap and swing it over a holding tank where the occupants could be dropped out of a door into the containment area. If one of the trap-ees tried to hold on to the cage we could have the crane operator bounce the cage until he fell out, then the crew would rebait the trap, swing it into place and move on to the next location. When the holding tank was full they could return to a detention center drop off their load.

If Mobile didn’t want to get into the crack trap business itself, the city could offer a crack/meth-head bounty and let private companies or independent operators get into the trapping business. Of course with a strong profit incentive the resource might get trapped out fast and eliminate the junkie population, and what a shame that would be. If we were lucky we might get the camera crews from the Discovery channel to chronicle our efforts and call it the “Junkiest Catch.”

I can just hear the opening of the first episode, “Three miles south of I-10 Captain Sullivan and the crew of the South Eastern approach their first trap of the day.” City leaders if you do implement my program all I want is a contract to run my own rig and the chance to pick a couple of prime trapping grounds.

See what I mean crack and meth heads, if you would have pulled one less stunt less and not messed with the Dumas Wesley center this wouldn’t of happened, but you did so beware of big metal cages with crack and meth inside because we’re coming for you.

P.S. Leave folks and their stuff alone, please!

Sean Sullivan is Lagniappe lagniappe columnist. Contact him at ssullivan@lagniappemobile.com.

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