Philadelphia: Heroin Hellscape
February 21st, 2017
Via: Philly News:
Along a half-mile gorge cut by a Conrail line that runs through Kensington and Fairhill, tens of thousands of used syringes and their tossed off orange caps cover the sloping ground like a plague of locusts. The contaminated needles make conditions so hazardous that even some police officers are reluctant to traverse the embankments to get to dead overdose victims at the bottom.
The squalor and chaos along the rail line resembles a scene from Hieronymus Bosch. Addicts – many with needle marks so fresh that still-drying blood glistens in the sun – twist their bodies into unnatural forms to crouch and teeter on the trash-covered banks as they shoot up. Others sleep under nearby bridges or in makeshift shelters surrounded by garbage, drugs, and death.
At a plywood shack known to denizens as “the hospital,” users too squeamish to inject themselves can pay a few dollars to a Ray-Ban-wearing addict who looks like he stepped out of a Mad Max movie.
“People come here when they have trouble to hit themselves,” said the 45-year-old man, who declined to give his real name. “So I hit them in the neck, you know what I mean? So I’m like the doctor. So they pay me.”
This apocalyptic terrain, sometimes called El Campamento, is home to 75 to 125 addicts at any given time. Many more transient users come each day to get high. It is the festering epicenter of Philadelphia’s heroin epidemic, a benighted territory the DEA considers the East Coast’s largest heroin market, smack dab in an area often referred to as the Badlands. And it has gone largely ignored for three decades.
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