“The Walmart of Heroin”

Summary

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

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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.

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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)

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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)

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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

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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.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign.

[B]

Welcome Back to the 10 Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. Joining me on today's show is Charles Fane Lehman. He's a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal, where his work is focused on policing public safety and drug abuse, among other issues. His writing has also appeared in a number of other publications, including the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, National Affairs, National Review, and other top publications. Today we're going to be discussing his story from our winter issue inside the East Coast's largest open air drug market, which is a deep look into the nightmarish conditions in Philadelphia's Kensington neighborhood. So, Charles, thanks very much for coming on.

[A]

Absolutely. Always happy to be here.

[B]

You went to Kensington yourself to report on the situation there and it is truly grim. But I wonder if you could just describe what the experience was like and what you saw. And even with what you knew going in that this was a kind of notorious area comparable to skid row in la, did anything surprise you about what you saw in terms of the realities on the ground?

[A]

You know, in a certain sense, if you've seen one drug market, you've seen them all. But then in another sense, they're always still sort of a shocking experience. I've, you know, been around to two or three of these at this point. Kensington's drug market looks a lot like many others. And I should say for context to the listeners, you know, the Kensington drug markets, the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, it is, as you alluded to by many accounts at least, the largest open air drug market on the east coast, possibly in the United States, depends on how you count. But so it looks exactly like a drug market does. There are people everywhere using drugs very openly, very publicly. I remember we were walking down the street and a woman flagged us down to ask if we had a lighter and she was holding a crack pipe in her other hand. I was like, well, I know what you're going to use the lighter for. So no, I do not. You can see people shooting up quite publicly, people stumbling around. And drug dealing is also quite prevalent. You know, one of the things that you notice is that these are still sort of commercial areas. There's a lot of like auto body shops, people selling carpets. But so much of the area is just dominated by flagrant drug use that it crowds everything else out.

[B]

It's quite a disturbing narrative that you provide in this essay. You know, Philadelphia's mayor Sherrelle Parker was elected a little over a year ago now, I guess on a tough on crime platform. And she has announced a plan to end the Kensington area drug market. So far, as you described in the essay, she's carried out a street sweep of Kensington Avenue. She's passed a law or enacted a law that requires businesses to close between 11pm and 6am in the morning. And then she's beefed up the police presence in the area. So I wonder, you know, what. What you saw when you were there was, was any of this in motion? And are these steps showing any results yet?

[A]

I was there last August, so I may be a little bit out of date. I think I saw some degree of change, but not a tremendous amount. There were a lot of government employees out and about, but much more folks who were charged with doing things like picking up needles or distributing naloxone than there was a visible police presence. But it was clearly wasn't deterring very much. You know, the other thing is my informant there, the fellow who showed me around, said there has been some degree of movement off of Kensington Avenue proper, but there's clearly just displacement to the adjoining areas, Atlantic Avenue, for example. And so what you see is not so much a cleaning up of the environment as people moving around. This is a common charge with, you know, policing of areas like this, where critics say, well, they're just doing displacement. And the evidence in the literature is that that can happen. And it take really a very deliberate effort to go from just displacement to really removing the drug market root and branch. The evidence in my eyes, does not say that they had done the latter. Yet.

[B]

One key argument you make in the essay, which is very interesting, is that for a crackdown to work, all of the steps need to be taken simultaneously because more piecemeal efforts to shut down such markets really just lead to suppliers changing their locations. So, you know, what do you envision a complete shutdown looking like? And how does that prevent the dealers from just dispersing and moving elsewhere to find buyers? What would be different about a simultaneous crackdown?

[A]

So the way to think about this is that in the default case, policing is to sort of think economically part of the cost of doing business at drug dealers. You expect that a certain fraction of your project will be seized, a certain number of your dealers will be taken off the streets. That gets factored into the structure price of the final product. It's a little bit like shrinkage. When you're a big box store, you just sort of assume you're going to lose a certain amount to firings or to people stealing stuff. And that's the way that it goes. There have been, however, a number of very successful efforts. Today, the strategy is called a drug market operation, a drug market intervention, a DMI that try to be more comprehensive in the way that they take down the infrastructure of the drug market. And so what you do is instead of rounding up dealers as you see them or as you have the opportunity to, you build cases on as many dealers as you possibly can, and you bring them in all at once, or as they did in Kentucky, Kensington, to some success, I think, five years ago. You target the sort of entire structure of distribution in a given area and take them all out at once. That's a much more intelligence driven, strategic operation. But what it does is cripple a component of the market because drug market's already pretty inefficient. They're oligopolistic. You usually only have one or two distributors. You only have a handful of guys who are doing distribution. If you can sort of get inside of their process and disrupt them wholesale, then it's very hard for the market to recover in a way that sort of piecemeal policing is still relatively easy.

[B]

Charles, what kind of other crimes are taking place in this area? Is it notorious for violence as well, or is it. Are these people just peacefully shooting up?

[A]

You know, that's one of the interesting things. I looked at Philadelphia city data and I showed that very conspicuously, Kensington's problem is with drugs and drugs specifically. So, you know, it's about a square mile. The census tracts. I use about a square mile. That square mile of Philadelphia, which is like half a percent of the city's total area, is home to a third of reported drug law violations. In 2023, a quarter of 311 calls requesting help from the city's opioid response unit. At about one in seven calls asking for camp cleanups and dealing with DUIs. So those are clearly drug related problems. But if you look at other measures, for example, if you look at something like homicides, There were about 17 homicides in Kensington last year. That's a lot. That's about 6% of in 2023. That's about 6% of what the city experience that year. But it's not the same disproportionate as you see for drawing problems. The same thing is true with maintenance complaints. Kennedy is responsible for only about 3% of the city's total maintenance complaints. So, you know, it's not exactly a safe place to be. I wouldn't recommend walking around there after dark. But on the other hand, it's not as many People often assume that drug use concentrates where violence also concentrates. They are distinct social problems. And the problem that Kensington has is a problem with drugs first and foremost.

[B]

Now, when you visited, did you go with police or social workers from the area or was. Was this just you on your own?

[A]

I actually have a contact who works in Philadelphia journalism who showed me around. He's been, he's been reporting from Kensington for decades and he sort of gave me the lay of the land.

[B]

I see. That's good. That sounds like a safe way to proceed. Now, you know, many drug policy liberalizers see controlled consumption sites as they're called, or harm reduction programs, something we've written about a lot, a better way to protect communities affected by drug use. So, you know, leaving the drug market confined to Kensington on this view might be better than the alternatives, they could say. So you know, what's your response to that and what are some of the larger social benefits that might follow closing down Kensington's drug market?

[A]

Yeah, and Kensington is actually A, has been the site of illicit supervised consumption sites, quote unquote. B, was close to the attempt to one of the earliest attempts to set up a supervised, illegal supervised consumption site in the United States States. That one was blocked by the Trump administration, which is why the first one went up in New York, not in Philadelphia. But they tried to do it there.

[B]

Just to pause for a second, Charles, maybe just explain what, what goes on there.

[A]

Well, you know, the principle is you should have a government sanctioned place where people can use controlled substances under the supervision of ostensibly trained staff, sometimes with medical credentials, armed with Lockstone, who can reverse your overdose. And proponents of these sites say nobody has ever overdosed supervised consumption site, which is true. What also is true is that if you look at the high quality research, they have no statistically identifiable effect on rates of overdose death. And this gets to your bigger question, which is that Kensington is sort of this concentrated zone like the Tenderloin. Like, you know, I think about Hamsterdam from the Wire, which is this sort of drug policy liberalizers fantasy of we'll just have this area where people are allowed to use drugs and that's fine. And what happens is that they become concentrated zones of profound human misery. And it's not just that you're putting everybody in one place so it looks worse. It's that when you put all of the drug users in one place, you get economies of scale, it becomes easier to sell to them, becomes easier to introduce diversity. You get all of the efficiencies, you get Agglomeration effects in much the same way that putting lots of people in one place in a city yields innovation and more than linear returns. 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. And so dismantling these sites often yields a meaningful reduction in drug overdose deaths, meaningful reduction in crime, because you are taking away that efficiency. Right. It's not actually more humane to create an efficient way for people to slowly kill themselves. It's inhumane to do that. It's humane to make it harder for people to kill themselves.

[B]

Yeah, that seems like common sense. Some of the drugs that you described were truly terrifying. I wonder if you could elaborate a little bit on what people are using there.

[A]

The thing about Philadelphia and think about a drug market is that if you have a very efficient drug market, you're going to end up having productivity diversity in much the same way that you can buy anything you want at Walmart. And so they've had fentanyl in Philadelphia for years and years and years. Philadelphia was also one of the first sites in the mainland United States that developed problems with xylazine, the animal tranquilizer that is now spreading across the east coast that's adulterating fentanyl and gives people wounds that don't heal at their injection sites. But I talked to a guy in Kensington who routinely uses crack and fentanyl together. Or, you know, I even talked. In this conversation, you talked about friends who were using pcp, angel dust, which hasn't really been a thing since the 1980s, but apparently you can score in Kensington. So, I mean, and this is, again, this is the nature of market is when you have lots of demand, you'll end up getting niche demand at sufficient level that it's worth creating a supply that you don't get. If it's just a handful of people loosely organized.

[B]

Yeah, that makes sense. You know, the United States. Final question, Charles. Has been enduring a drug addiction crisis for many years now. You mentioned fentanyl over. Opioids have really been at the heart of the drug crisis. You know, I wonder what the significance of Kensington is within that broader story. And what effect might shutting it down have on national trend?

[A]

There are two answers. One is that when you have spaces like this, they usually become hubs for trafficking. There's. I alluded to this research on something called the Kensington Initiative, where Philip PD, with the support did federal law enforcement shut down basically an entire drug trafficking syndicate in Kensington. And this paper shows that there are declines in drug use activ in adjoining markets in like the rest of Pennsylvania and parts of Delaware. Because if Kensington gets less efficient, then it becomes less efficient of a connection for other markets. So that's, you know, when you go after these big sites, you can really make the crisis better. But there's also, I think places like Kensington have become a touch point for the crisis. The reality, sadly is that it is often hard to get people to care about drug overdose, drug abuse, drug death, that it's less visible, everybody kind of knows somebody. But it's still hard to convince people that this is a problem. But people are very responsive to images of this is what you city could look like if you don't get this problem under control. And so I think talking about Kenzie is a way to say, look, this is what drugs do. This is not what prohibition does. This is not what social norms do. This is not what, you know, society does. This is what drugs do. And if you recognize that this is a problem, which it obviously is, you should want to do something about the drug problem.

[B]

Well, thank you, Charles Lehman. The essay in our winter issue is called Inside the East Coast's Largest Open Air Drug Market. It's a compelling read. Don't forget to check out Charles's many other stories stories on the City Journal website. You can find him on X CharlesF. Lehman and we'll link to his author page in the description where you'll be able to find all of this material. You can also find City Journal on X ityjournal and on Instagram ittyjournalmi. If you like what you've heard on today's podcast, please give us a good rating on itunes. Charles Lehman, great to talk with you.

[A]

Absolutely. Thanks so much.

[B]

Thanks for joining us for the weekly 10 Blocks podcast featuring featuring urban policy and cultural commentary with City Journal editors, contributors and special guests.