This is true. I am a government employee. We are trained to look for anything suspicious and how to handle them. Our customer service staff at my work wear gloves and masks when opening mail just in case and if they encountered anything weird they’d get them tested.
Funny enough, my main office is in Tacoma where one of the letters in question was sent. (But I work for the state, not the county, so it didn’t go to us luckily. We get enough freaking threats as it is.)
Anthrax is something that’s actually dangerous if handled normally and has been used in actual attacks in the past. It’s much more of a threat. The idea that people leap to “fentanyl” must show the power of scaremongering and recentism in social media.
As mentioned above, it was often said in the 90’s that most paper money you had on you would have “traces” of cocaine on them.
How much is a “trace” in these cases? Unless there is enough to be remotely dangerous I am not sure it is worth mentioning.
Put another way, was this a prank and the people doing it had some traces of fentanyl on them that got in the mail or were they putting enough fentanyl in to poison people?
(Either way they should be tracked down and prosecuted IMO.)
I wouldn’t know how to acquire or make anthrax. I could have fentanyl mailed to my house within a week or two. It’s readily available on the dark web.
That is to say, if you want to harm (or just scare) people, there’s not a whole lot of roadblocks to getting it.
If it’s a trace on the order if the trace of cocaine that was supposedly on most money, then no, don’t mention it to the victim. Along with not mentioning all the other stuff that would be considered “routine”, and expected.
If it’s enough that it looked like someone intentionally put fentanyl in the envelope, then mention away, to both the victim and the news.
So you’d be okay with everyone thinking you did cocaine? Because that’s what that statement implies.
The same is true of saying that the letters contain traces of fentanyl. The assumption being made in this very thread is that this means the letters had fentanyl intentionally added to the letter.
If that’s not the intent, then saying something contains “traces of X” is rather misleading. And misleading statements are by definition not the whole story.
This discussion has become ridiculous, in my opinion. Obviously the fentanyl concern in these cases is sufficient for it to be a factor. The police don’t regularly mention trace elements of things commonly found everywhere in their reports. If they did, there wouldn’t be a headline about any case anywhere that didn’t feature a comment about “Traces of cocaine found!”
From the piece:
According to emergency records, responders including officers from the Eugene Police Department were dispatched to the Lane County Elections Office on west 10th Avenue at about 11:36 a.m. on November 8. EPD officials confirmed the office had received a letter that appeared to be suspicious or dangerous, and officers were called to get it out safely. Officials did not elaborate on the nature of the suspicious letter, but said a hazardous materials team from Eugene Springfield Fire and EPD were able to collect the letter and bring it in for analysis.
Nothing is mentioned locally about fentanyl, but in the piece in the New York Times I linked to earlier, it was. From this we can infer that there was something in some of the envelopes that tested positive for fentanyl.
If I was one of the people handling these envelopes, I’d want to know.
As for @Whack-a-Mole’s example, impugning the reputation of an individual person by publishing such a thing is in no way analogous to publishing information about a potentially hazardous item being weaponized to terrorize a group of people like elections workers.
That’s the real problem. “Traces of cocaine (or fentanyl)” means something very different to the public and to the media talking heads than it means to forensic chemists and prosecutors.
The oath in court mentions not only the truth, but the whole truth. Which includes the context necessary to make sense of that truth. That’s what’s lacking in media reporting and pretty much always has.
Impugn? Maybe. Seems lazy journalism. How much is “trace” amounts? How dangerous was it to the recipients? We are not told. Just that “trace” amounts exist which tells us very little.
That said, I mentioned it above and I will say it again…I hope the FBI (or whatever appropriate law enforcement) work diligently to catch the people who sent this stuff. Clearly they are trying to terrorize these election offices. Even if the letters only had flour in them I would want to see these people caught and prosecuted.
The investigating agencies are not yet at liberty to release this information, so news agencies are not able to state with any specificity more than what they were told: “Trace amounts.” So of course we don’t know yet.
Either you trust these folks to do their jobs well – both law enforcement and your media sources – or you don’t. I trust my local police, the FBI, some of my local media sources and the New York Times, along with a few others. No “lazy journalism” required.
I am confident that fentanyl has been mentioned because it is a notable factor. It may turn out to be a negligible factor, but it is a factor at this point.
ETA: I do know this: If the news media failed to mention fentanyl and it turns out to be an important factor, would you be glad they didn’t mention it in their initial reports? Wouldn’t it seem like they were trying to keep significant information from the public?
Thanks, that makes sense. If some letters were confirmed earlier to have traces of fentanyl, then it seems reasonable to assume the others did as well or at least take precautions as if they did.
I had originally got the impression that they saw white powder and immediately reported fentanyl based solely on appearance, which seems odd. But that’s clearly not what happened.
I guess I’m not confident of that. If a letter has powder in it, even if the powder turns out to be baking soda, that’s obviously a threat. Powder doesn’t accidently get into envelopes. That’s news. But if the forensic report came back with “traces of fentanyl” that might not be news. It might be that a journalist saw an unedited report and took that out of context. Chemical testing can pick up extremely small amounts these days.
It’s certainly possible they found enough fentanyl that it was a risk to the recipients. Maybe the police thought there might be enough to be a hazard, or weren’t certain. If they did, then yes, it’s news. But honestly, that’s not clear to me from the reporting.
(and also, the article in the OP is unreadable on a phone. scary ads that look like your phone is infected pop up. So I wasn’t even clear on exactly what had been reported until I opened my laptop to type this reply.)
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():format(webp)/science-fair-project-175514265-34bd0b66bdcf443ca595ef0035a89744.jpg)