IT WAS THROUGH the glass screen of my windshield that I first saw the people, residents of the city of Philadelphia, where I also live, who suffer from drug addictions so severe that they live, unhoused, unprotected from the elements, buying, injecting, and experiencing the effects of sedative drugs in plain view and so close to a kind of living death that the internet refers to them as “zombies.”
I passed Kensington Avenue, a congested two-lane thoroughfare that runs underneath the raised subway throughout North Philadelphia, and then drove along the edge of a park circumscribed by a low stone wall. Across the grass and through the trees, I could see a noble white-columned building at the park’s center and a sign: the McPherson Square branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia, on whose grounds I saw camping tents sheltered by blue tarps and people sleeping on the walls, on benches, and under the trees. I saw trash and shopping carts and many, many people. Some were moving and speaking, and some were not. Those not moving were mostly standing, and those standing were mostly doubled over so far that their hands brushed the ground, or leaning to one side at dramatic and unnatural angles. Most were thin, even emaciated. Many of their limbs showed visible wounds, bruises, or scabs.
I knew already that this neighborhood—Kensington—and particularly the ten-block radius around Kensington and Alle-gheny, is, according to my local news site, Billy Penn, “the aortic valve of the region’s opioid crisis,” or, as described in a New York Times Magazine piece despised by many Philadelphians for its parachute journalism, “the largest open-air narcotics market for heroin on the East Coast.” Though data on homelessness by Philly neighborhood are notoriously hard to come by, the most recent figures released by the Office of Homeless Services suggests that the majority of unhoused people in the city are also struggling with addiction. The problem was only compounded by initiatives in 2019 and 2021 to clear encampments from Kensington train tracks and underpasses.
But I didn’t know then that this park had long been dubbed “Needle Park,” or that reporter Mike Newall had written a whole series of articles about how librarians at this branch were charged not only with recommending books or dispensing computer passwords but also with administering Narcan (naloxone) to patrons inside the building and people overdosing on the lawn. I didn’t know that a new substance—“tranq dope,” a mix of fentanyl and a veterinary drug called xylazine—had popped up in
