First long Kensington Ave there were mainly Poles, Irish and Germans. Then came the industrial crisis that changed everything and opened the door to the drug trade. There drug An increasingly dark and negative spiral ensued that gripped part of Philadelphia over the course of half a century. Today, this street represents the Lost Land of America, a zombieland of drug addicts with lost eyes and evaporated souls in a place the goddess has renamed “one of the greatest drug trafficking hubs in North America.”
Cyclic the videos from this city street that greeted the Declaration of Independence appear in the media. People writhed under the influence of hallucinations, bivouacs in broad daylight on the sidewalks, and drug dealers around every corner. An apocalypse scenario that nobody in Hollywood could have imagined with such heartbreaking clarity. The last tour in chronological order was until Vivek RamaswamyCandidate in Republican primary “farther right than Trump,” who toured Kensington denouncing humiliation.
The atmosphere in this handkerchief of America is surreal. A strip of tarmac covered by an elevated road reveals a long line of run-down two-story houses interspersed with abandoned factories, in a neighborhood teeming with cheap Chinese takeaways, pawn shops, check shops and seedy Irish pubs. As the New York Times reported in a long report, window notices are about missing persons. Nearby, an army of drug dealers lines Main Street, side streets, and plazas, offering the deadly goods, in many cases even distributing free samples. In between there are zombies, people smoking crack out of a glass pipe, others who want to use methamphetamine or heroin. In broad daylight you see people with needles in their arms, on their necks or between their toes. Many have collapsed, many are looking for another dose. But that wasn’t always the case along Kensington Avenue.
From the golden years to the collapse
Kensington’s golden years lasted relatively long. According to historians for a period from the second half of the 19th century to the 1950s. This area of the city housed migrants of Caucasian descent from Ireland and Central Europe. For a time, around the turn of the century, the area was a livable neighborhood for workers. Some of the European immigrants left to support the large body of workers in thriving US heavy industry, while others represented the urban fabric of small artisans, made up of makers of tools, hats, lace, or cigars. Then came two crises that split the idyll.
The first began in the 1920s with the introduction of inexpensive products onto the market that destroyed the craft. Then in the 1950s came the great internal migration that caused millions of African Americans to leave the South to seek their fortunes in the North, especially there factories in the Midwest which promised secure, well-paid work. The transfer was the basis of race riots, which were also sparked by the arrival of Puerto Ricans. In between, a slow and irreversible process of deindustrialization destroyed the rest of the local economy.
Within a few decades, by the late 1960s, Kensington found itself with fleeing whites in the more affluent, safer suburbs, a majority black and Hispanic population in a now-deserted, post-industrial area of over 30,000 abandoned buildings. An uncontrolled social process that has cut off the entire neighborhood from the rest of the city. And so, abandoned warehouses and factories became the perfect place for the emergence of a drug trafficking hub. A mix accelerated by the nearby rail line and interchange with freeways connecting the Northeast of the country to the center of the United States.
The arrival of the drug
The drugs arrived in Kensington early. Johnmachen, a former addict interviewed by the Philadelphia Inquirer, said he was one of the first: “The first heroin addicts like me showed up towards the end of 1968.” The drug hasn’t left these alleys and streets since. This is proven by the story of John, who a few years ago lost his daughter Stephanie (25 years old) to an overdose due to a mixture of heroin and alcohol fentanyl.
The market has seen different owners and phases, but never a decline. The 1970s were dominated by Irish and Italian-American gangs, with their substances mostly originating in the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia. Then, towards the end of the decade, the cocaine, as the anthropologist and expert on submerged markets Philippe Bourgois put it. The white powder was created in the 1980s thanks to an alliance between Colombians (led by Pablo Escobar) and African-American organized crime groups. The new Hispanic social fabric immediately favored the introduction of South American cocaine, which is said to be much purer than Asian and over 200 times cheaper.
At the end of the decade another turning point: the Crack. The streets of Kensington are being ravaged by the new Coke and Baking Soda concoction that is even more devastating to drug addicts. At this moment, the neighborhood gets the sad nickname “wasteland“. The real breakthrough in the neighborhood’s global imagination came in the early 1990s, when Colombians, Dominican gangs and Mexican cartels introduced a new grade of heroin, an opioid so pure it can be snorted. Then the neighborhood was gripped by modern America’s new drama, the giant opioid crisis.
It’s a shame that those obsessed with climate change and third world poverty no longer care about the misery on the streets here at home. I didn’t visit Kensington because it’s a popular meeting place for presidential candidates, but because it’s not. pic.twitter.com/N6tOSb9FyF
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) July 17, 2023
The drug market
The neighborhood square is thriving and filling up with new customers. Thousands of people are flocking to the streets in search of cheap heroin to replace painkillers such asoxycontin. The last step to hell comes with something terrible that brought it all down: fentanyl. L’synthetic opioidflooding the US thanks to Chinese supplies from Mexico is driving death and mortality rates to perhaps unprecedented levels.
The latest available data speak of around 1,300 deaths overdose in the Philadelphia area in 2021. The county in which the city is located has the highest rate of drug-related deaths among the 10 most populous counties in America. According to the local government health department, more than 75,000 residents of the city use heroin and other opioids. The latest nightmare is the weird mix of fentanyl and xylazinea powerful animal tranquilizer that literally paralyzes and “bends” drug addicts.
The entire Kensington “industry” is fed by the “industry”.drug tourists‘, people coming from neighboring states like New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia and Maryland. But not only. There are also those who come from far away, from Massachusetts to Texas. Some commute, others arrive and end up being swallowed and fighting to the last dose.
Kensington is a place where a lot of money moves. The single syringe is cheap, costing $5, and the drug dealers, the first link in the long chain, circulate 16-dose packets that can be bought for $80. A single block, Block, can bring in $60,000 of heroin per day, which translates to $21 million per year. Josh Shapiro, now Pennsylvania’s governor and state’s attorney until a few years ago, figured the Kensington market might have some value a trillion dollars per year.
The entire structure of the shop is governed by a pyramid shape. At the bottom are the drug dealers, often already addicted to drugs, then the block supervisors, the contractors who manage parts of the neighborhood, and those who regulate the receipt of goods. According to police, there are at least 80 “corners” in just under 2 miles of Kensington Avenue drug markets open sky.
The gears of the drug economy
Half a century of drug trafficking rewrote the neighborhood’s DNA and created thisinformal economy (and illegally) the center of everything. Selling drugs is the residents’ only occupation in a forgotten place that no longer has any productive structure. A young man with no prospects, Bourgois explained, is practically forced to “work for his goal”. Across the region, the median income is less than $17,000 a year. To get an idea, just consider that the national average is $17,000 69 thousand dollars. Half of the population lives below the poverty line. Education levels are very low and most under-20s don’t even have advanced degrees.
In this scenario, it is not surprising that children also play a macabre role, explains Bourgois. Many of them serve as collateral for a few dollars, warning those responsible for the blockades before the police arrive. Likewise, there are those who get through. For example those who can sell clean needles. There are associations in the region that provide free needles to drug addicts. They follow a program started in the late ’80s and early ’90s to stem the spread of the drugAIDS. So whoever manages to keep a shred of clarity lines up to get the needles and then sells them for $2.
Obviously the whole system is not subject to the laws of supply and demand. It leans on Violence and the neighborhood has historically seen waves of armed violence. On the one hand, it’s about picking up scores for controlling the territory, on the other hand, it’s about local residents targeting drug dealers when the situation becomes untenable. In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, there were nearly 263 roadside shootings, 47 of which were fatal, and the following two years have fared no better: 244 in 2021 and 269 in 2022.
The endless nightmare
For many, Kensington is hell on earth, a labyrinth with no way out. There are also several veterans among the drug tourists. Some have a handful of missions behind them Afghanistan And Iraq. The Times down the avenue, for example, collected the story of Mark, who was injured by an IED in Iraq and became in severe pain and subsequently addicted to painkillers. Over time, pills became increasingly difficult to obtain, and eventually he switched to heroin. “My girlfriend and I are addicts,” he said, “we left the north to look for a cheaper rehab center down south, maybe in North Carolina.” Stopover in Kensington on the way and used heroin mixed with fentanyl: “I’ve never felt so bad in my life. “I know,” he added, “that I risk never leaving again.”
For many who die from drug overdoses, there are others who keep coming and going. Jax, who works as a prostitute for a few bucks, told the NYT how she overdosed at least nine times in two weeks, and each time the effects were interrupted with a squirt of naloxone, a powerful drug that can reverse the effects of the fatal dose. “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t survived,” he says with a lost look, “I wish they would let me die.”