The Philadelphia Board of Health postponed a vote on Councilmember Quetcy Lozada’s mobile service regulations, citing legal, policy and equity concerns about a district-specific law affecting Kensington.
There’s a drug tourism problem in Kensington. Every summer, hundreds of people come here to use drugs. The neighborhood has an international reputation as the East Coast’s largest open-air drug market. It’s time for that reputation to change.
I’ve lived in Kensington for 12 years. For eight of those years I worked at McPherson Square Library, ending my time there as the LEAP youth advocate.
On my first day of work in 2015, I Googled the library to look up how to get there from my home nearby. The first image that popped up was someone injecting drugs on a bench in front of the entrance.
Little has changed since then. We’re still seeing the summer swells. There are a lot more people living on the street right now than there will be come wintertime. It’s a pattern I’ve seen since I got here, and I’m hopeful we can change it.
Why is this important right now?
Drug tourism stresses the city’s resources. The police, the health department, and temporary housing providers are all maxed out during the summer months. We need to make gains now to tackle the overall drug situation. Those that come here for the summer often get addicted to the poisonous cocktail found in Kensington, and this addiction keeps them locked in the neighborhood.
With the FIFA Club World Cup coming to Philly in summer 2026, we’re going to have tourists coming in. Possibly “misery tourists,” who come up to Kensington for a day and shoot video of the Kensington “zombies.” It’s a real thing, and we can expect an influx of it from everyone from Dr. Oz to everyday influencers.
The city also has big plans for America’s 250th birthday in 2026. Last fall, at a planning meeting for these events, Seventh District Councilmember Quetcy Lozada asked the city to “make sure visitors do not come to gawk at the neighborhood’s well-known issues with homelessness and addiction,” according to reporting from Metro Philadelphia. She referenced videos of Kensington going viral on YouTube, TikTok and elsewhere.
“We can’t say that we’re going to identify federal, city and state dollars to prepare the city for 2026, and we can’t identify those same dollars to make sure that we restore quality of life in the city of Philadelphia in the Kensington/Harrowgate community,” Lozada said during the hearing.
The cost of all this is a state senator who doesn’t know children live here, and decides not to spend money on repairing family homes. It reinforces the idea that Kensington doesn’t deserve resources. And it keeps the drugs in this neighborhood.
My proposal is simple: We need to change this reputation.
Violet Gehringer, a harm reduction specialist with Prevention Point, co-leads a Narcan training at McPherson Square Library on March 12, 2025. (Photo by Solmaira Valerio)
The truth about drugs in Kensington
We have no control over the prices of the drugs, and the city has been struggling for years to make the drugs harder to access. We probably cannot convince anyone that drugs in Kensington are not cheap and accessible.
People come to Kensington because we have a reputation for having cheap, potent and easily available drugs. We have been called the “Walmart of heroin.”
Because of Kensington’s internet presence, people know where to find drugs, the potency of the drugs and how much they cost. It’s a drug user’s shopping guide.
But I also believe that people in active addiction fear withdrawal. We haven’t established Kensington as a place where the drugs cause horrible withdrawal symptoms. And that’s where we can make gains.
The truth is that the supply has been tainted — first by fentanyl, known nationally as one of the strongest opioids available, and then with the emergence of veterinary tranquilizers such as xylazine and — most recently — medetomidine.
Medetomidine Fast Facts ℹ️
Medetomidine is now present in over 70% of Philadelphia’s illicit fentanyl. It has replaced xylazine as the most common drug adulterant in Philadelphia.
Medetomidine is not only present in drugs that are injected. It can also be found in drugs that are smoked.
People overdosing from medetomidine are more comatose than people overdosing from xylazine. Administering Narcan may not bring a person back to consciousness. When responding to medetomidine overdose, look for breathing, not responsiveness.
Source:Philadelphia Department of Public Health, June 2025 Update Prevention Point Philadelphia
Medetomidine doesn’t cause the same skin wounds xylazine does. But using it can cause an abnormally slow heart rate and severe gastrointestinal effects.
On top of that, withdrawal from medetomidine can cause anxiety, delirium and extremely fast heartbeats that emergency room physicians are describing as much more severe than typical opioid withdrawal.
The number of people presenting to the emergency room in withdrawal from this drug has doubled in the past year, according to the health department. Roughly 90% of those people were admitted to the ICU and one-quarter were intubated.
If more people knew these details, they might not come to Kensington for drugs.
I am asking city officials, community organizations and residents to unite in branding the drugs available in Kensington as poison.
So what do we do?
We need city officials holding press conferences calling for the CDC’s support in addressing this new, life-threatening substance. We need public health warnings about the tainted drugs in Kensington. We need a deluge of public health officials calling these drugs “poisonous,” “painful,” and “tainted.”
Further, we need to emphasize the withdrawal symptoms of these drugs. Drug tourists are seeking more potent drugs because they have a growing tolerance and a fear of withdrawal.
A Philadelphia Inquirer article I read last year quoted someone in Kensington saying that being in withdrawal feels “like your soul is being ripped out of you.”
Instead, emphasize the suffering of withdrawal from these poisonous drugs. Make it clear that these drugs make painful withdrawal symptoms more likely, not less.
While city officials spread the word about the poisons tainting drugs in Kensington, residents need to band together and fight misery tourism.
My family and friends around the country are aware of the situation here. They are aware because they have seen a YouTube video or TikTok video shot by a misery tourist. There are people out there profiting on our community’s struggles.
How you can push back against drug tourism
Do 👍
Complain to YouTube, TikTok, Instagram about this. Raise awareness that we are not cool with misery tourism.
Notify companies that advertising on these influencers’ pages promotes drug tourism and discourages you from using their products.
Start advocating for FIFA and tourism agencies to tell fans that misery tourism isn’t a fun thing to do between matches. If fans want to help, point them to local youth soccer programs.
Talk about our neighborhood as a place of growth. Share community garden videos and neighborhood wins.
Find your own ways to spotlight neighbors’ lives and bring beauty and kindness to the neighborhood.
Don’t 👎
Support those that promote and profit from drug tourism. Don’t click on those videos. When you click them, they appear in more peoples’ feeds. It adds them to algorithms. And it gives the misery promoters advertising dollars. They are making thousands of dollars, while our children step over discarded bloody bandages. Stop clicking.
Give interviews to “influencers” visiting the neighborhood. You may think added awareness will lead to more help. But we’ve had these misery videos for over a decade. Have they brought help—or just cemented an image of Kensington as a place of despair?
We need to get involved in these conversations, and push for a view of this neighborhood as one that really needs help creating safe space for children, families and the elderly.
What good would this do?
Well, it costs us little to try. Plus, every person dissuaded from coming to Kensington to use drugs is a victory.
Each person dissuaded means more resources for those that are here. It reduces the strain on the police and criminal justice system. It means fewer people defecating in the streets and sidewalks. Summer drug tourism is not new. It is a yearly phenomenon. But we can make progress.
This is not a silver bullet solution that fixes everything. It is a low-cost initiative that can occur in conjunction with other efforts and can be embraced by all. We don’t need to accept drug tourism as inevitable. We don’t need to highlight our struggles and hide our achievements.
We cannot wait until next summer to try and rebrand these drugs. We need months of steady messaging for the rebranding to take root. We need people calling the drug supply out for what it is: poisonous and painful. We need to focus on harms done by both misery tourism and drug tourism.
have something to say?
You can write an op-ed like this one.
Just email sammy@kensingtonvoice.com with your idea.
