A guy in my apartment building has fallen hard into meth addiction in the last year or so. He’s told us about his meth use several times so I’m not just assuming. He’s become extremely skinny, has become very scatter brained, and constantly leaves his stuff and other messes all over our building. (Landlord is trying to evict him and we’ve been trying to convince him to get help but that’s a longer story.) He’s the only one that lives in his unit.
For the last couple months, every week he’s been bringing home what seems like a ton of groceries from the food bank. It’s one of the food banks that are set up like a grocery store for people to pick what they want. When he gets back to our building with his groceries, he immediately starts trying to sell them to us and other building tenants, saying he can’t eat most solid foods and that it’s going to go to waste if we don’t buy it from him. He also tells us how broke he is and that he’ll give us a really good deal. He leaves a lot of the food out in the building halls, and over the next few days we’ll watch the bags of produce, bread, meat, etc. that he’s left out start to rot until someone throws them away. Sometimes he’ll bring random people by the building to sell the food to. This has been going on for months.
So to summarize, he’s consistently taking what seems like a lot of food that he has zero of intention of eating, and trying to sell it. Presumably at least some of his proceeds go toward supporting his drug habit. Then the food he can’t sell just sits in our hallways rotting until it gets thrown out. It seems like he eats a non-zero amount of it but if I were to guess it’s 90% stuff he has no intention of eating.
I’m not normally one to police how social services are given out, but like, this seems a bit extreme and like it might be doing more harm than good to the guy if it’s helping fund his habit. Is this worth reporting to the food bank? I’m not super informed on Seattle food banks so I don’t know if there’s usually enough to go around or if he’s potentially depriving someone else who could actually eat it. It seems like he’s taking a lot of food, but I’ve never been to a food bank, is the amount one person is allowed to take negligible compared to the whole operation? I dunno man, I’m usually against people trying to decide who “deserves” social services, but this whole thing seems so wasteful and potentially harmful. Should I try reporting this to the food bank, or just mind my own business?
submitted by /u/chewymammoth
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