NPR: In Philadelphia's Kensington neighborhood, heroin is far from 'chic'
By Guillermo A. Santos
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, lingering under bridges and near subway stations. They stagger with needles still in their arms or hunch over in the pains of withdrawal, sometimes motionless in the middle of the street trying to keep standing. In those videos, you can see the house where I grew up.
