Philly keeps a billion-dollar open-air drug market contained in Kensington

Many people will talk about I-95, the presence of the El stops in the neighborhood, and the past abundance of abandoned factories and homes as the natural causes of Kensington becoming the site of more than 50 separate open-air drug markets at a time, with people spending hundreds of millions of dollars here per year. But it’s not as if Kensington is home to rolling fields of poppies being processed into heroin, and any attempts to find natural causes is doomed to failure — plenty of other neighborhoods near transit and highway stops have struggled with abandoned properties without also containing the largest open-air drug market on the East Coast.

November 11, 2021 | 7:46 pm