Monday, September 06, 2021 11:15:06 PM
Trapped by the ‘Walmart of Heroin’
2018 - "US life expectancy drops again as opioid deaths and suicide rates rise"
A Philadelphia neighborhood is the largest open-air narcotics market for heroin on the East Coast. Addicts come from all over, and many never leave.
By Jennifer Percy Oct. 10, 2018
[...]
“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.”
[...]
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.
[...]
At the bottom of the station steps, I met John, a 55-year-old man who lived with his parents. John was a “guide”: He guided customers from the train to the drugs. He could help you find heroin, cocaine, PCP, marijuana, Xanax, Percocet virtually any time of day or night. He could help you shop around, compare prices and quality. His own drug of choice was heroin, which he sniffed. John carried a grocery bag filled with clean needles. He got them from Prevention Point, a nonprofit on Kensington Avenue that exchanged dirty needles for clean ones. Needle exchanges helped stop the spread of H.I.V. and hepatitis C. But John was smart and made a small business out of it. He sold clean needles for $2. “You don’t come from our world,” he told me, “and we don’t come from your world.”
[...]
When Philadelphia’s progressive mayor, Jim Kenney, took office in 2016, he soon made it a priority to tackle the city’s opioid crisis. His administration wanted to focus on getting heroin users into treatment rather than arresting them. In late 2016, Kenney created a task force of addiction experts, doctors, social workers and agents from the D.E.A. to come up with a plan to curb overdose deaths in the city. In May 2017, they offered 18 recommendations, including a media campaign about the risks of opioids, wider distribution of Narcan and support for medically assisted treatment, which uses opioid-replacement drugs like Suboxone to help users manage withdrawal.
[...]
“It’s not an easy issue,” Kenney had told The Philadelphia Inquirer .. http://www.philly.com/philly/health/addiction/A_hidden_heroin_hellscape.html . “It’s going to take many years and a ton of money, so that may have been why it hasn’t been addressed in the past — but that’s not an excuse.”
[...]
The city offered treatment, but most of the displaced heroin addicts didn’t accept it. They moved into crumbling churches, abandoned buildings, vacant lots. They pitched tents on the grass at McPherson Square, where library staff regularly rushed outside with bottles of Narcan to save the overdosed. The police told the users to be on their way. Some of them moved to the abandoned and boarded-up Ascension of Our Lord Church, on a windswept corner of Westmoreland Street about a mile northeast of the tracks. They gathered in pews, beneath light raining through stained-glass windows. They left needles in the holy-water basin.
[...]
This January, Gov. Tom Wolf signed a statewide disaster declaration, the first of its kind for a public-health emergency in Pennsylvania. There had been more than 1,200 overdose deaths in Philadelphia in 2017 — a 34 percent rise from 2016. Wolf pushed the state to roll back regulations that might be stopping users from getting help, like ID and sobriety requirements for shelters and treatment facilities. Instead of sending overdosed people back out onto the street, the city hired recovery specialists in the E.R. to talk to them about treatment. It handed out tens of thousands of doses of Narcan. It sent a van into the neighborhood to offer recovery services. It gave residents blue light bulbs for their porches, because the light seemed to make it harder for heroin users to find a vein.
Shanta Schachter, a community development consultant who was hired by Conrail during the cleanup as a liaison between the company and neighborhood organizations, watched the new encampments grow throughout the winter.
[...]
The city was willing to try almost anything. In January, the Department of Public Health announced that the city would “encourage organizations to develop” supervised-injection sites, where people can bring their own drugs without fear of arrest and inject under the care of a medical team. There are roughly 120 of these injection sites around the world — although none in the United States — and research has shown that they reduce overdose deaths, connect addicts to long-term care and help keep neighborhoods clean of needles. There has never been a fatal overdose at an official safe-injection site. The Justice Department made it clear that it would view any such place to be in violation of federal drug laws, but Ed Rendell, the former Pennsylvania governor and Philadelphia mayor, threw his support behind a nonprofit group trying to establish one.
[INSERT: A leading voice for positive change
The first ‘official’ supervised injecting facility in the world began in Switzerland in 1986. The Uniting Medically Supervised Injecting Centre (Uniting MSIC) has been operating in Kings Cross, Sydney since May 2001. For 17 years Uniting MSIC was Australia’s only supervised injecting facility. A second Australian facility opened in North Richmond, Melbourne in June 2018.
P -As of 2019, there are more than 120 supervised injecting facilities operating around the world, in Switzerland, Germany, Spain, The Netherlands, Norway, Luxembourg, Denmark, Canada, Portugal, Iceland and France, amongst others. More are being planned in places like Ireland and Scotland.
https://www.uniting.org/community-impact/uniting-medically-supervised-injecting-centre--msic/history-of-uniting-msic ]
[...]
A woman sleeping below the Kensington Avenue underpass. Jeffrey Stockbridge for The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/magazine/kensington-heroin-opioid-philadelphia.html
"US life expectancy drops again as opioid deaths and suicide rates rise"
2018 - "US life expectancy drops again as opioid deaths and suicide rates rise"
A Philadelphia neighborhood is the largest open-air narcotics market for heroin on the East Coast. Addicts come from all over, and many never leave.
By Jennifer Percy Oct. 10, 2018
[...]
“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.”
[...]
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.
[...]
At the bottom of the station steps, I met John, a 55-year-old man who lived with his parents. John was a “guide”: He guided customers from the train to the drugs. He could help you find heroin, cocaine, PCP, marijuana, Xanax, Percocet virtually any time of day or night. He could help you shop around, compare prices and quality. His own drug of choice was heroin, which he sniffed. John carried a grocery bag filled with clean needles. He got them from Prevention Point, a nonprofit on Kensington Avenue that exchanged dirty needles for clean ones. Needle exchanges helped stop the spread of H.I.V. and hepatitis C. But John was smart and made a small business out of it. He sold clean needles for $2. “You don’t come from our world,” he told me, “and we don’t come from your world.”
[...]
When Philadelphia’s progressive mayor, Jim Kenney, took office in 2016, he soon made it a priority to tackle the city’s opioid crisis. His administration wanted to focus on getting heroin users into treatment rather than arresting them. In late 2016, Kenney created a task force of addiction experts, doctors, social workers and agents from the D.E.A. to come up with a plan to curb overdose deaths in the city. In May 2017, they offered 18 recommendations, including a media campaign about the risks of opioids, wider distribution of Narcan and support for medically assisted treatment, which uses opioid-replacement drugs like Suboxone to help users manage withdrawal.
[...]
“It’s not an easy issue,” Kenney had told The Philadelphia Inquirer .. http://www.philly.com/philly/health/addiction/A_hidden_heroin_hellscape.html . “It’s going to take many years and a ton of money, so that may have been why it hasn’t been addressed in the past — but that’s not an excuse.”
[...]
The city offered treatment, but most of the displaced heroin addicts didn’t accept it. They moved into crumbling churches, abandoned buildings, vacant lots. They pitched tents on the grass at McPherson Square, where library staff regularly rushed outside with bottles of Narcan to save the overdosed. The police told the users to be on their way. Some of them moved to the abandoned and boarded-up Ascension of Our Lord Church, on a windswept corner of Westmoreland Street about a mile northeast of the tracks. They gathered in pews, beneath light raining through stained-glass windows. They left needles in the holy-water basin.
[...]
This January, Gov. Tom Wolf signed a statewide disaster declaration, the first of its kind for a public-health emergency in Pennsylvania. There had been more than 1,200 overdose deaths in Philadelphia in 2017 — a 34 percent rise from 2016. Wolf pushed the state to roll back regulations that might be stopping users from getting help, like ID and sobriety requirements for shelters and treatment facilities. Instead of sending overdosed people back out onto the street, the city hired recovery specialists in the E.R. to talk to them about treatment. It handed out tens of thousands of doses of Narcan. It sent a van into the neighborhood to offer recovery services. It gave residents blue light bulbs for their porches, because the light seemed to make it harder for heroin users to find a vein.
Shanta Schachter, a community development consultant who was hired by Conrail during the cleanup as a liaison between the company and neighborhood organizations, watched the new encampments grow throughout the winter.
[...]
The city was willing to try almost anything. In January, the Department of Public Health announced that the city would “encourage organizations to develop” supervised-injection sites, where people can bring their own drugs without fear of arrest and inject under the care of a medical team. There are roughly 120 of these injection sites around the world — although none in the United States — and research has shown that they reduce overdose deaths, connect addicts to long-term care and help keep neighborhoods clean of needles. There has never been a fatal overdose at an official safe-injection site. The Justice Department made it clear that it would view any such place to be in violation of federal drug laws, but Ed Rendell, the former Pennsylvania governor and Philadelphia mayor, threw his support behind a nonprofit group trying to establish one.
[INSERT: A leading voice for positive change
The first ‘official’ supervised injecting facility in the world began in Switzerland in 1986. The Uniting Medically Supervised Injecting Centre (Uniting MSIC) has been operating in Kings Cross, Sydney since May 2001. For 17 years Uniting MSIC was Australia’s only supervised injecting facility. A second Australian facility opened in North Richmond, Melbourne in June 2018.
P -As of 2019, there are more than 120 supervised injecting facilities operating around the world, in Switzerland, Germany, Spain, The Netherlands, Norway, Luxembourg, Denmark, Canada, Portugal, Iceland and France, amongst others. More are being planned in places like Ireland and Scotland.
https://www.uniting.org/community-impact/uniting-medically-supervised-injecting-centre--msic/history-of-uniting-msic ]
[...]
A woman sleeping below the Kensington Avenue underpass. Jeffrey Stockbridge for The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/magazine/kensington-heroin-opioid-philadelphia.html
"US life expectancy drops again as opioid deaths and suicide rates rise"
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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