Charles Fain Lehman joins Brian Anderson to discuss the drug crisis in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood.
Audio Transcript
Brian Anderson: Welcome back to the 10 Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the Editor of City Journal. Joining me on today’s show is Charles Fain 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.
Charles, thanks very much for coming on.
Charles Fain Lehman: Absolutely. Always happy to be here.
Brian Anderson: 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 notorious area comparable to Skid Row in LA, did anything surprise you about what you saw, in terms of the realities on the ground?
Charles Fain Lehman: 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 a shocking experience. I’ve been around to two or three of these, at this point. Kensington’s drug market looks a lot like many others. I should say, for context for the listeners, the Kensington drug market is 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. 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.
Brian Anderson: It’s quite a disturbing narrative that you provide in this essay. Philadelphia’s mayor, Cherelle Parker, was elected, a little over a year ago now, 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 11:00 PM and 6:00 AM in the morning, and then she’s beefed up the police presence in the area. I wonder what you saw when you were there, was any of this in motion, and are these steps showing any results yet?
Charles Fain Lehman: 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 clearly wasn’t deterring very much.
The other thing is, my informant there, the fellow that 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 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. It takes 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.
Brian Anderson: 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.
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?
Charles Fain Lehman: The way to think about this is that, in the default case, policing is to 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 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, which 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 Kensington to some success I think five years ago, you target the 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 markets 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 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.
Brian Anderson: Charles, what kind of other crimes are taking place in this area? Is it notorious for violence as well, or are these people just peacefully shooting up?
Charles Fain Lehman: 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. It’s about a square mile, the census tracts I use, about a square mile. That square mile of Philadelphia, which is half a percent of the city’s total area, it’s 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, and about one in seven calls asking for camp cleanups and dealing with DUIs.
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. In 2023, that’s about 6 percent of what the city experienced that year, but it’s not the same disproportion as you see for drug problems.
The same thing is true with maintenance complaints. Kensington is responsible for only about 3 percent of the city’s total maintenance complaints. 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’re distinct social problems, and the problem that Kensington has is a problem with drugs, first and foremost.
Brian Anderson: Now, when you visited, did you go with police or social workers from the area, or was this just you on your own?
Charles Fain Lehman: I, actually, have a contact, who works in Philadelphia journalism, who showed me around. He’s been reporting from Kensington for decades, and he gave me the lay of land.
Brian Anderson: I see. That’s good. That sounds like a safe way to proceed. Now, many drug policy liberalizers see “controlled consumption sites” as they’re called, or “harm reduction programs,” something we’ve written about a lot, as a better way to protect communities affected by drug use. Leaving the drug market confined to Kensington, on this view, might be better than the alternatives they could say. What’s your response to that, and what are some of the larger social benefits that might follow closing down Kensington’s drug market?
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, and Kensington is actually A, has been the site of elicit supervised consumption sites, B, was close to one of the earliest attempts to set up a supervised illegal supervised consumption site in the United 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.
Brian Anderson: Just to pause for a second, Charles, maybe just explain what goes on there.
Charles Fain Lehman: Well, 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 and even naloxone, who can reverse your overdose. Proponents of these sites say nobody’s ever overdosed at supervised consumption site, which is true. What also is true is that if you look at the highest quality research, they have no statistically identifiable effect on rates of overdose death.
This gets to your bigger question, which is that Kensington is this concentrated zone, like the tenderloin, like I think about Hamsterdam, from The Wire, which is the drug policy liberalizers’ fantasy of, we’ll just have this area where people are allowed to use drugs and that’s fine.
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, it 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, a 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.
Brian Anderson: 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.
Charles Fain Lehman: The thing about Philadelphia and the thing about a drug market is that 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. 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 I even talked, in this conversation, we talked about friends who are using PCP, angel dust, which hasn’t really been a thing since the 1980s. But apparently, you can score in Kensington. 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.
Brian Anderson: Yeah, that makes sense. The United States, final question, Charles, has been enduring a drug addiction crisis for many years now. You mentioned fentanyl. Opioids have really been at the heart of the drug crisis. I wonder what the significance of Kensington is within that broader story and what effect might shutting it down have on national trends?
Charles Fain Lehman: There are two answers there. One is that when you have spaces like this, they, usually, become hubs for trafficking. I alluded to this research on something called the Kensington Initiative, where Philly PD, with the support of federal law enforcement, shut down, basically, an entire drug trafficking syndicate in Kensington. This paper shows that there are declines in drug use activity in adjoining markets in 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. That’s 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 your city could look like if you don’t get this problem under control.
And so I think talking about Kensington 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 society does. 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.
Brian Anderson: 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 on the City Journal website. You can find him on X @CharlesFLehman, 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 @CityJournal and on Instagram @CityJournal_MI. 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.
Charles Fain Lehman: Absolutely. Thanks so much.
Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
