Everything old is new again as Jennifer Percy's piece in NYT Magazine tells us, as Philly's Kensington neighborhood has become America's one-stop shop for heroin, serving the East Coast as America continues to lose the War on Drugs.
In the summer of 2017, when I first toured the area with Patrick Trainor, a special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration, he called Kensington the largest open-air narcotics market for heroin on the East Coast. It’s known for having both the cheapest and purest heroin in the region and is a major supplier for dealers in Delaware, New Jersey and Maryland. For years, the heroin being sold in Kensington was pure enough to snort, but that summer, it was mixed with unpredictable amounts of fentanyl. In Philadelphia, deaths related to fentanyl had increased by 95 percent in the past year.
Philadelphia County has the highest overdose rate of any of the 10 most populous counties in America. The city’s Department of Health estimates that 75,000 residents are addicted to heroin and other opioids, and each day, many of them commute to Kensington to buy drugs. The neighborhood is part of the largest cluster of overdose deaths in the city. In 2017, 236 people fatally overdosed there.
“We have not only people from other parts of the state,” Trainor said, “we have people from other parts of the country who come here.” Every year, “drug tourists” from all over the United States visit Kensington for the heroin. Eunice Sanchez, a local pastor, put it more succinctly: the area, she said, was the “Walmart of heroin.”
Once a blue-collar factory neighborhood, Kensington was especially devastated when deindustrialization swept through the area in the 1950s. (Philadelphia neighborhoods don’t have officially designated boundaries, and the northeast section of the city, including West Kensington, East Kensington, Fairhill, Port Richmond and Olde Richmond, is often referred to as “Kensington.”) As the white population fled for the suburbs, Hispanic and African-American people moved in, and with few investments from the city, the drug market filled the economic vacuum. Houses transformed into drug dens, factories into spaces to shoot up, rail yards into homeless encampments. Most residents, many of them immigrant families who had come to Kensington for a better life, did not have the means to move.
In the early 2000s, Dominican gangs started bringing in Colombian heroin that was not only purer but much cheaper than heroin imported from Asia, which historically predominated. Kensington’s decentralized market kept competition high and prices low. Most corners were run by small, unaffiliated groups of dealers, making the area difficult to police; if a dealer was arrested, there was always someone there to replace him. The Philadelphia prison system has become the largest provider of drug treatment in the city. The police have realized that they can’t arrest the problem away, and they spend many of their calls reviving drug addicts with Narcan, an overdose-reversal spray. The D.E.A. focused on the high-level drug traffickers, not the guys working the streets, but the arrests did little to curb the growing demand.
“They call this the Badlands,” Elvis Campos, 47, said about Kensington. “Good people are held hostage in their homes.” Campos, who moved to the neighborhood 22 years ago, lives on a small, crumbling block next to a demolished crack house. “I didn’t know about the drugs when I came,” he said. “I found the house, and it was cheap.” No one on his block used or sold drugs, he said, and his neighbors worked hard to keep it clean. But dealers were always around their homes trying to sell. “I tell them to leave,” Campos said. “I served in Iraq, and I think that’s why I’m good at telling drug dealers to get off the block.”
Like Campos, many residents had come to Kensington simply because they couldn’t afford housing anywhere else, and though many expressed empathy for the users, they also wanted them to leave. People cleared needles off their lawns, their front steps and the sidewalks where their children played. Some wouldn’t go anywhere unless they were in a car, but a lot of families were too poor to afford a car. They organized cleanups, lobbied City Council members and state representatives and asked for help from church groups, but the problem seemed insurmountable. The drug market, institutional racism, joblessness and the ravages of the war on drugs in the ’80s left the community struggling. “You see everything here,” one female resident told me. “Overdoses, shootings, killings. We are exposed to trauma every day just living here. It’s constant.”
Dealers fought for territory and intimidated police informants. The area has one of the highest rates of shootings and murders in the city. Less than two-thirds of the residents have a high school diploma, and only a fraction have a bachelor’s degree. Nearly half the residents live below the poverty line. And yet parts of the neighborhood were solidly working-class, and the edges of the neighborhood were gentrifying. “The narrative of the opioid crisis is focused on big-pharma greed,” Zoë Van Orsdol, a public-health specialist, told me, “but in Kensington the reality is far more complicated.”
The residents are fighting back, but there's nowhere they can go. They're trapped because nobody will buy their homes, so they can't move out. Kensington never recovered from the bad ol' days of the 80's. Both the city and the state are starting to remove encampments of homeless drug users, but treatment funding cuts from the Trump regime means that there's no extra money for getting users sober, so they just change locations. And all the while, new addicts to big pharma painkillers know they can always go to Kensington if they need to take the edge off.
It's a human disaster and there's no end in sight.
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