Editing Opioid Crisis (section)

== Kensington ==

Kensington, the North Philadelphia neighborhood at the crisis's epicenter, has become nationally notorious. The area's streets feature open-air drug markets where dealers sell and users consume in plain view. Encampments of homeless addicts occupy vacant lots. Bodies of overdose victims are discovered daily. The neighborhood, which had already suffered from decades of [[Deindustrialization|deindustrialization]], now deals with a crisis that compounds every existing problem. Longtime residents navigate around drug activity to conduct daily life; some have left, while others lack resources to move. Kensington represents both the worst of the opioid crisis and the failure of public response to address it effectively.<ref name="macy"/>

The concentration of drug activity in Kensington reflects both market logic and policy choices. Drug sellers located where customers knew to find them; users concentrated where drugs were available. Law enforcement efforts that cleared drug markets from other neighborhoods pushed activity toward areas with less political power to resist. The result was a concentrated zone of visible suffering that shocked visitors but represented daily reality for residents. Efforts to disperse the market through enforcement have temporarily relocated activity but not eliminated it; the market reconstitutes wherever users and sellers congregate.<ref name="quinones"/>