Harm reduction activists gathered outside City Hall on March 7. Harm reduction services help save lives, writes the Editorial Board, and must have city support as part of the plan to tackle the Kensington open-air drug market.It is a long-overdue move from City Hall after a failed strategy that mired the neighborhood in homelessness, public drug use, and violence.people struggling with addiction until they’re ready for treatment can play a vital role in fixing what ails Kensington.
Lozada frames her decisions as supporting the wishes of her constituents, longtime residents of Kensington who are sick and tired of watching their children navigate around used needles and crumpled bodies on their way to school. Alongside her allies in the Kensington Caucus and the Parker administration, she is also pushing for “triage centers” to direct those suffering from addiction to treatment options, or in the case of refusal, incarceration.
What has happened in Kensington over the last decade, what former 7th District Councilmember Maria Quiñones Sánchez described as a “containment strategy,” was morally wrong. It never should have been the case that most of the burden for the city’s opioid epidemic should fall on the poorest residential community in Philadelphia.
If Parker and the Kensington Caucus want to push the drug market out of Kensington, they need to identify spaces somewhere for harm reduction services to operate — with city support.