Kensington has been called many things over the years. The Walmart of Heroin. The Las Vegas of Drugs. “How do you know the toothbrush was invented in Kensington?” one longtime Philadelphia drug user joked. “Because anywhere else, they would have called it the teethbrush.”
The East Coast’s largest open-air drug market (according to the Drug Enforcement Administration), Kensington has long symbolized the dysfunction of a city that once served as America’s capital. Shots of Kensington’s “zombies” make for local news fodder and X outrage. The city’s failure to fix Kensington was central to the successful mayoral campaign of Cherelle Parker, a tough-on-crime Democrat, sworn in as Philadelphia’s 100th mayor in January 2024.
So far, Parker has made gestures at delivering. On assuming office, she appointed a deputy police commissioner charged with addressing the neighborhood’s affliction. Within months, she had announced a “five phase” plan to close down the market. A massive street sweep of Kensington Avenue followed, as did a law that shuttered businesses between 11pm and 6am. A wave of new recruits to the Philadelphia Police Department was assigned to patrol the area.
These moves have met with resistance from the usual suspects. Keisha Hudson, who runs the Defender Association of Philadelphia, called Parker’s tactics “a return to draconian and ineffective crime and drug policies.” “These horrible backwards policies will fail,” predicted Robert Saleem Holbrook, director of the Abolitionist Law Center, in reference to Parker’s tough-on-crime approach.
That Parker has offended people is not, in itself, evidence that her strategy is working. Visit Kensington, as I did last August, and it seems quieter than some other drug markets. But the open-air use and dealing remain visible. People are still strewn across sidewalks, smoking or shooting fentanyl, or hunched in the half-awake stoop of the opiate high. And regulars say that while the main thoroughfare, Kensington Avenue, has been cleared out, most of the activity has just shifted location. Even a casual walking tour confirms that this is true.
Parker’s plan, of course, has not come fully to fruition. But if her administration really wants to end the Kensington chaos, it needs to take seriously a challenge that has bedeviled municipal administrators for decades: how to shut down a drug market.
…the only way to suppress the market is to replace it with something else: a functional neighborhood.
Even in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Kensington was a manufacturing hub, its Irish residents conspired to organize a gang that eventually became the Irish mafia. The fraught 1950s brought displacement of ethnic Whites by Black and Puerto Rican arrivals.
But it was only as Philadelphia deindustrialized through the 1960s that the drug market began to take root. It grew continuously through successive heroin, crack and methamphetamine crises. By the late 1990s, Kensington was the “best” place to score heroin on the East Coast. The 2000s brought pills, followed by fentanyl — and, eventually, the tranquilizer xylazine, which creates horrific, unhealing wounds in users and which now shows up in over 90 percent of the city’s dope.
In other words, the neighborhood has had a drug market living off of it, like a parasite, for a long time. Killing that parasite requires efforts on all fronts. It means arresting dealers — lots of dealers, all at once. It means treatment for addicts from Philadelphia and shipping out non-Philadelphians who come to the city to get high. And it means a commitment to rehabilitating the neighborhood, from vacant lots to condemned buildings.
Whether this is possible — within material or political constraints — is another question. But Kensington admits of no half measures. If the Parker administration, or any subsequent one, thinks that it can get by with those, the problem will only return, worse than ever.
What makes a drug market?
To see Kensington for yourself, catch Philadelphia’s SEPTA Market-Frankford El train, and ride it north to Somerset or Allegheny station. Hop off, and you’ll find yourself in the Las Vegas of Drugs.
What makes for a drug market, exactly? After all, it’s possible to get drugs in many places: college campuses, say, or at raves. But these aren’t “markets.” What makes Kensington different? The first, most visible answer is public drug use. People sit or lie on the sidewalk, or stumble around. They smoke or inject publicly, with relatively little regard for passing pedestrians — or cops. Where, exactly, they do this within the area can change. Since the Parker administration cleared Kensington Avenue, consumption has shifted to side streets. But walk along Allegheny Avenue, and you’ll still see lots of people nodded out.
Many of those shooting up on the streets of Kensington aren’t from the neighborhood. Census data say that the area is largely Hispanic, populated by recent, low-earning residents living in the cheapest place available. Yet many, even most, of the faces on the street are White, since the market attracts buyers from around the greater Philadelphia region, including from Delaware and New York. Some come just to visit but end up staying longer than anticipated.
What draws so many buyers — and what really makes Kensington a drug market — is supply. In most places, you need to know the right person to score; in Kensington, it’s easy to “cold cop.” Just approach one of the ubiquitous groups of corner boys and make a buy. If help is needed, guides will direct you, for a fee.
Prices are low, about $8 per small plastic bag (the standard unit of sale), $2 cheaper than buying in South Philly. If you try, you can even stay “well” all day by taking free samples (yes, drug dealers offer samples). And if you want someone to shoot you up, guys can get paid to do that, too. (Though this poses risks — one source claims that eight people had their vocal cords paralyzed by a bad injector.)
The Parker administration, more than its predecessors, seems to get this. Whether it has the political means to do something about it is another question.
Most important, the market offers product diversity. Fentanyl, the hyper-potent synthetic opioid responsible for the lion’s share of drug deaths, is ubiquitous. But it’s also easy to score meth and crack, for those mixing uppers with downers. (One user says that his usual order is “three down, one hard” — “down” being fentanyl, “hard” being crack.) More retro drugs are also available, with PCP (“angel dust”) allegedly making a comeback.
Kensington is also a hot spot for the latest substances, including those that users might not want. When xylazine — the horse tranquilizer now spreading through the fentanyl supply, leaving users with necrotizing wounds — first hit the continental United States, it landed in Kensington. More recent additions include medetomidine (another veterinary tranquilizer) and Tinuvin 770, an additive to industrial coating materials. (Why the second, no one is sure; a source working in drug-checking guesses that it was just a mistake somewhere in the drug manufacturing process.)
These novel mix-ins are part of why people stick around in Kensington. If you get hooked on xylazine, you need to stay near a supply of the drug to stay well. If the only place to get it is Kensington, then Kensington is where you stay.
But that’s a small part of the story. What’s appealing about Kensington is precisely that it’s a market: Competition yields low prices, high quality and diversity of product to cater to a heterogeneous population of consumers. On top of that, you can use there with relatively little hassle. Drug addicts come to Kensington because it’s a good place to do drugs.
It’s the drugs
Philadelphia City data capture how highly concentrated the drug crisis is. Measured generously, the market is geographically a bit less than a mile square, equivalent to roughly half a percent of the city’s total area. But that square mile was home to more than a third of Philadelphia’s reported drug-law violations in 2023. It was also the site of a quarter of 311 calls requesting help from the City’s opioid response unit, as well as one in seven calls for camp cleanups and one in seven DUIs (which include driving under the influence of drugs).
Notably, other issues are not nearly as concentrated in the area. Kensington saw 17 homicides last year, representing about 6 percent of the city’s total — a disproportionate share of the whole, but not nearly so concentrated as drug use. Other crimes, major and minor, follow a similar pattern: They’re more common in Kensington, but not nearly as common as drug-related offending. Kensington accounted for more than a thousand 311 maintenance complaints, for example — a large number, but only about 3 percent of the city total.
And while Kensington is not a pleasant place to live or work, it is not at the very bottom of the barrel. The census tracts that make up the Kensington market are poor, with annual median household incomes of $27,000 to $36,000. But while they’re in the bottom quintile, they’re not the poorest of the poor in the city; those areas are in West Philadelphia, in neighborhoods like Mantua.
In other words, Kensington has certain challenges common to dysfunctional neighborhoods. It has poverty; it has crime; it has disorder. But it does not have more of these things than Philadelphia neighborhoods that aren’t among the largest open-air drug markets in the country. Kensington’s quandary is not — contrary to what many routinely claim — primarily disadvantage, poverty or racism. It’s drugs.
The success of the Kensington Initiative suggests that change is possible. But it also highlights the scale of the intervention necessary for a strategic response to work.
That goes for the people who frequent Kensington, too. Take Tommy [last name withheld], a White South Philly native who’s been using opiates since he was 16. Now 34, he is remarkable among long-term Philadelphia users for having avoided the telltale xylazine flesh wounds (by luck, not because he doesn’t use the stuff). Tommy is, to put it crudely, the sort of addict you can get along with. He’s chatty and insightful. Like many long-term users, he has a comprehensive knowledge of his pastime. But he has other interests, too, like skateboarding and music. By profession, he’s a plumber, a trade that, under other conditions, he might ply well enough to avoid living in a tent. He’ll never win a Nobel Prize, but there’s no reason he couldn’t live a normal, stable life in a city like Philadelphia.
No reason, that is, except one. Over the course of several hours of conversation, Tommy goes from ebullient to shivering; if he doesn’t use, he says, he’ll soon start throwing up. A short trip to Kensington, and he can correct the deficit. Within a few minutes, he scores. When next seen, he is in the characteristic nod of fentanyl and xylazine intoxication, sitting at the SEPTA station, struggling to stay awake.
Tommy’s problem, like Kensington’s, then, is drugs — and the market that provides them.
Neither cops nor healthcare workers are enough
That what distinguishes Kensington is its drug market is not merely an academic observation. Addressing the neighborhood’s difficulties and those it poses for Philadelphia requires doing something not just about poverty, violence or other sources of disadvantage, but something about the drug market itself. As decades of research and real-world effort have shown, that’s easier said than done.
Abstractly, markets are the simple result of supply meeting demand. People want potatoes; they’re willing to pay money for potatoes; potato growers respond by producing potatoes; buyer and seller are matched, and a market is made. The same holds for drugs: People want fentanyl, other people have fentanyl to sell, and a deal gets struck.
Part of what makes markets powerful is that they are dynamic. If there’s a potato blight, prices can rise to incentivize new growers or encourage substitution to other tubers. Thanks to prohibition, drug markets are less efficient, but they demonstrate the same adaptivity.
This limits the effectiveness of policing efforts in Kensington. Despite a heavy police presence — one in eight pedestrian stops in 2023 occurred in the Kensington market area — drug sales persist. Routine enforcement is unlikely to make much of a dent in the market, as the risk of arrest becomes just another business cost, passed on to consumers. And because synthetic drugs are so cheap and plentiful, these cost increases do little to reduce demand. Policing, in this context, often resembles a game of Whac-A-Mole, with enforcement becoming part of the cycle rather than a solution.
But if routine policing isn’t an effective strategy, neither are the strategies often favored by policing critics. Philly has for years been a leader in “harm reduction,” the set of policies aimed at lessening the harms of drug use without reducing use. In 1992, then-Mayor (later Governor) Ed Rendell authorized the operation of one of the nation’s first needle-exchange programs, Prevention Point. The center still operates today, offering a variety of harm-reduction services; many users in Kensington carry gray cards, notifying police that their needles came from Prevention Point. In 2018, Philadelphia even tried to become the first city in America to open a supervised consumption site — albeit in South Philadelphia, miles from Kensington. The project, though, was waylaid by a federal lawsuit, and it remains mired in legal troubles.
The Parker administration, perhaps eager to signal a different tenor, has moved to end the $1 million in public funding that Prevention Point received under prior mayoralties. But in June, the City handed out opioid settlement funds to other harm-reduction focused organizations. And it projected spending nearly $1.8 billion on behavioral health generally in the 2024 fiscal year.
In Kensington, moreover, you see almost as many city service workers as you do cops. Safety-vest-clad employees check in on dozing users, administer naloxone, and hand out supplies. Two street sweepers, charged with picking up the ubiquitous needles that carpet Kensington’s streets, reported that they each expected to clear 100 to 200 syringes that day; there would doubtless be a similar number tomorrow.
Much as a ubiquitous police presence has had little impact on the drug market, ubiquitous health services have done little to stem the tide of overdoses. That’s unsurprising. Research suggests that, while needle-exchange programs may limit the spread of HIV, they do not reduce overdose deaths — and may actually increase them. Insofar as harm-reduction services mitigate the risks of drug use, they make using in places where they are available more attractive than using in places where they are not available. The City’s commitment to harm reduction, in other words, is a perk of shopping in Kensington — a publicly funded benefit for drug users.
This does not necessarily mean that the City should stop providing harm-reduction services; that decision depends on the balance of cost and benefits. But it does help explain how health workers are no more effective at addressing Kensington’s woes than are beat cops. They, too, are just another part of the market.
Philly has done this before
It’s not enough, then, to police Kensington more or provide more services. The drug market — the people and practices that make it a hub of drug commerce for the whole region — must be eradicated, root and branch.
That’s easy to say but much harder to do. Municipalities have had success shutting down small drug markets. The famous High Point, North Carolina, drug-market initiative, for example, significantly reduced violence and drug dealing in an open-air market in that city. In the initiative, High Point law enforcement identified and built cases against all the dealers in the targeted area. They then called them in and gave them the option: Stop dealing — or go to prison for a long time. Within weeks, the market had vanished.
High Point, though, is a tiny city; its target market was run by just 16 dealers. Kensington has dozens of drug-dealing groups operating. Shutting them down one by one will just create opportunities for the others to grow, or for new players to enter the market. Much as in High Point, Philadelphia would need to arrest all the dealers more or less simultaneously.
Philadelphia has tried more strategic approaches before. In 1998, Operation Sunrise initiated massive street sweeps; in 2002, Operation Safe Streets focused on putting cops on hot-spot corners. Critics of these efforts argue that they largely displaced activity and that any progress that they made has clearly been undone. Research is more equivocal, with one analysis of Safe Streets finding that it reduced violence but mostly shifted drug dealing to other blocks.
The City’s commitment to harm reduction, in other words, is a perk of shopping in Kensington — a publicly funded benefit for drug users.
More recent efforts seem to have borne more fruit. In 2018, the City and state launched the Kensington Initiative, which focused on identifying, arresting and incarcerating about 100 higher-ups in the Kensington market, hoping to cripple the drug-running infrastructure. Two evaluations suggest that this approach improved the situation on the ground. One, from a team at Temple University, found a statistically significant reduction in adult loitering and signs of drug selling.
The other, a more comprehensive evaluation by criminologist Zachary Porreca, used cell phone data to show that the initiative dramatically reduced foot traffic in the market. This, in turn, yielded declines in overdose and drug demand, as well as in activity in other regional drug markets, suggesting that the Kensington Initiative took out a major link in the regional drug-supply chain.
The success of the Kensington Initiative suggests that change is possible. But it also highlights the scale of the intervention necessary for a strategic response to work. It’s a starting point that city, state and federal law enforcement should take as a blueprint for a bigger initiative. To close the market, they’ll need to arrest as many dealers as possible, as instantaneously as possible. Anything less risks the drug trade reemerging, hydra-like, in short order.
Local residents need more local control
Tackling supply is only part of the equation. Hundreds of addicts, from the city and the surrounding region, create demand. And while shutting down supply will deter their consumption, separately intervening to reduce that demand will help the supply-side intervention stick.
Philadelphia has an advantage here: Many of those routinely buying in Kensington are not city residents. Getting them to leave should be relatively easy — offered the choice of arrest and prosecution or a bus ticket, most people will choose the bus. Slightly more challenging is identifying who is and is not a Philadelphian, though that information can plausibly be gleaned by police from arrest records. Most important, the City needs to communicate loud and clear that it will be focusing enforcement efforts on non-Philadelphian users. Such public deterrence promises can often do more to keep people away than actual enforcement does.
Still, the City can’t in good conscience push out users who are native Philadelphians. The Parker administration is moving to invest $100 million in 600 new addiction-treatment beds. That’s a good start, but it’s unclear what the total number of beds needed is, and for what period of time. Getting a clear picture of the Philadelphia-native dependent population through street surveys and a review of public records could help target requests for state and federal resources.
Clearing out dealers and users would do a lot to impede the market. But the market is also entangled with the built environment of Kensington, from empty buildings and vacant lots to the de facto “supervised” consumption sites that spring up from time to time. Restoring Kensington as a neighborhood means giving its non-drug-selling residents a sense of control over the space. Clearing and greening vacant lots, tearing down empty and condemned houses, increasing street lighting, and ensuring that streets remain clean may all seem like minor details. But the only way to suppress the market is to replace it with something else: a functional neighborhood.
All this is, to put it mildly, a heavy lift. The City will need support from the state and federal governments. Leaders at these levels may not want to make Kensington their concern — even if, by refusing, they let the situation worsen. What the Kensington Initiative’s record suggests, though, is that Kensington is everybody’s issue. A hub for drug dealing, particularly of this size, becomes a locus for drug use in the surrounding region. Clearing it out will yield benefits for Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware. That’s reason enough for intragovernmental collaboration to scale up.
In the third season of David Simon’s award-winning television series The Wire, one of the show’s protagonists hatches a radical plan. Sick of the drug dealing in West Baltimore, he decides to create a “free zone,” where dealers can sell without police harassment — so long as they remain in the zone and stay away from neighborhood residents. “Hamsterdam,” as it is eventually labeled, has become a cultural touchstone for drug-policy liberalizers, who have argued that such an approach would be preferable to the “War on Drugs” status quo.
It’s not hard to see a real-life Hamsterdam: Just visit San Francisco’s Tenderloin, parts of Harlem and Washington Heights — or Kensington. These are neighborhoods where the cops and municipal leaders have given up, where drug dealing is ignored, so long as it doesn’t spill into the respectable parts of the city. The results are not peace and comity but ruthlessly efficient markets, bringing death and dysfunction to their surrounding cities, states and regions.
The Parker administration, more than its predecessors, seems to get this. Whether it has the political means to do something about it is another question. Any Kensington cleanup will be stymied, moreover, until the cleaners grasp that a drug market must be taken out all at once. Anything short of that will yield only a temporary victory.
Can Kensington be closed? The question has more than local implications. For decades, hundreds of thousands of Americans have died at ever-rising rates as hapless politicians look on, unsure of how to stop the flood of deadly drugs. Open-air markets like Kensington’s represent the most awful concentrations of this curse. If it can be stopped there, perhaps it can be stopped elsewhere, too.
Charles Fain Lehman is a contributing editor of City Journal, where this article first ran, and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Sign up for City Journal’s newsletter here.
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