Podcast Summary: City Journal Audio – “The Walmart of Heroin” (February 12, 2025)

Episode Overview

Host: Brian Anderson, Editor of City Journal
Guest: Charles Fain Lehman, Manhattan Institute Fellow and Contributing Editor
Main Theme:
A deep-dive into Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, known as the East Coast’s largest open-air drug market. Lehman recounts first-hand observations from his reporting trip, discusses the realities of street-level drug dealing and use, analyzes recent policy responses, and situates Kensington’s crisis in the broader context of the national opioid epidemic.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. On-the-Ground Reality in Kensington

• Grim Regularity of the Scene:
  Lehman describes how Kensington is “exactly like a drug market does” with open public drug use, drug dealing, and a loss of normal commerce due to the scale of the crisis.
  Memorable moment: Woman openly asks for a lighter while holding a crack pipe (01:22).
• Surprising Details:
  Despite prior research, the scale and open nature of the drug use and dealing shocked Lehman.

2. Philadelphia’s Policy Response

• New Mayor's Initiative:
  Mayor Cherelle Parker has talked tough, enacting changes like business curfews and increased police presence (03:06).
• Marginal Impact So Far:
  Lehman observed movements like increased government workers (mostly public health, not police) but little substantive change. Drug use has simply migrated to neighboring streets, indicating displacement rather than resolution:

  “What you see is not so much a cleaning up... as people moving around.” (03:40)

3. Effective Crackdowns: Why Piecemeal Fails

• Economic Logic:
  Disrupting the drug market piecemeal is just factored in as part of the “cost of doing business.” Structured, intelligence-driven crackdowns (Drug Market Interventions) are far more effective:

  “Instead of rounding up dealers as you see them... you build cases on as many dealers as you possibly can, and bring them in all at once.” (04:54)

• Case Study:
  Past operations in Kensington, as well as elsewhere, show the market is highly susceptible to coordinated interventions, not sporadic policing.

4. Crime Patterns Distinct to Kensington

• Disproportionate Drug Issues:
  Kensington, while covering only half a percent of the city’s area, accounts for a third of Philly’s reported drug violations in 2023 (06:10).
• Violence Not as Disproportionate:
  The area has more homicides than average, but not at the same scale as drug-related issues. Drug use, rather than violent crime, is the neighborhood’s primary problem.

  “Many people assume... drug use concentrates where violence concentrates. They are distinct social problems.” (06:54)

5. Harm Reduction vs. Market Dispersal

• Supervised Consumption Sites Debate:
  Philadelphia considered opening one of the first government-sanctioned supervised drug use sites (08:13), but:

  “High-quality research [shows] they have no statistically identifiable effect on rates of overdose death.” (08:45)

• Agglomeration Effects:
  Centralizing drug users increases efficiency for dealers, deepening the crisis rather than containing it:

  “It’s not actually more humane to create an efficient way for people to slowly kill themselves. It’s inhumane to do that.” (09:46)

6. Drug Diversity and Market Evolution

• Wide Range of Drugs:
  Kensington offers everything from fentanyl to xylazine, crack, and even PCP—the diversity enabled by sheer scale and demand (10:18).
• Market Analogy:

  “If you have a very efficient drug market, you’re going to end up having product diversity in much the same way that you can buy anything you want at Walmart.” (10:20)

7. National Significance of Kensington

• Hub for Trafficking:
  Shutting down markets like Kensington disrupts regional trafficking networks, tangibly reducing drug activity even outside the immediate area (11:35).
• Powerful Symbolism:
  The neighborhood’s visible suffering becomes a catalyst for action, serving as a stark warning for other communities:

  “This is what drugs do... if you recognize that this is a problem, which it obviously is, you should want to do something about the drug problem.” (12:32)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On experiencing Kensington:

  “There are people everywhere using drugs very openly, very publicly... so much of the area is just dominated by flagrant drug use that it crowds everything else out.” — Charles Lehman (01:35)

• On market displacement:

  “You see... not so much a cleaning up of the environment as people moving around.” — Charles Lehman (03:44)

• On coordinated drug market crackdowns:

  “If you can sort of get inside of their process and disrupt them wholesale, then it’s very hard for the market to recover.” — Charles Lehman (05:35)

• On agglomeration effects:

  “Putting a lot of people who use drugs in one area yields innovation and more than linear returns for people who are trying to sell them drugs.” — Charles Lehman (09:25)

• On harm reduction site effectiveness:

  “Proponents of these sites say nobody has ever overdosed at a supervised consumption site, which is true. What is also true is that... they have no statistically identifiable effect on rates of overdose death.” — Charles Lehman (08:40)

• On what Kensington means nationally:

  “Places like Kensington have become a touch point for the crisis... this is what drugs do.” — Charles Lehman (12:24)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:01] — Initial impressions and ground-level view of Kensington
• [03:06] — Reviews of new policy responses in Philadelphia
• [04:35] — Why simultaneous crackdowns work, and how
• [06:10] — Unique crime patterns in Kensington: drugs vs. violence
• [08:13] — Debate on harm reduction and supervised consumption sites
• [10:18] — Diversity of drugs found, and market dynamics
• [11:35] — Kensington’s significance in the national drug crisis

Final Thoughts

Charles Lehman’s reporting offers a vivid, ground-level perspective on America’s open-air drug markets. Kensington is portrayed not just as a local disaster, but as a warning and a strategic target with implications for national drug trends. He criticizes partial or solely harm-reduction approaches and makes a clear, evidence-based case for more comprehensive, coordinated interventions to disrupt the underlying markets enabling such suffering.