In Philadelphia's Kensington neighborhood, heroin is far from 'chic'
A young poet and writer who lost his father to opioid addiction says there's nothing cool about what the drugs did to his dad. So why are peers trying to look like emaciated people with addiction?
In 2021, after years of societal neglect and denial around the issue, the number of overdose-related deaths in the U.S. reached more than 100,000, the largest it had ever been. One of those people was my father.
In December of that year, his life was finally taken from him by a lethal cocktail of heroin and fentanyl after a lifelong dependency. This is a story that many Americans, especially those in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington where he lived and I grew up, know well.
If you look up videos of the worst of the opioid epidemic, you will see Kensington's "zombies." People seem to fall asleep standing up,
