Kensington is a neighborhood in Philadelphia. It was once called the Walmart of Heroin, because of its massive open-air drug market.

Those were the good old days.

Now Kensington is the epicenter of the fentanyl epidemic that is destroying America. Its streets are littered with needles and syringes. The few remaining shopkeepers in the area sweep them up with push brooms you would use on a shop floor. They fill trash cans with them. Then they start sweeping again.

In, around, and on the syringes, needles and trash are people or maybe more accurately, the husks of people. They sit on the steps of abandoned buildings. They lie on the filthy sidewalks. They crouch in the alleys.

Many if not most of these people are unconscious. They are gaunt, only partially clothed, and glassy-eyed. Some may already be dead but will not be discovered until much later.

Fentanyl is an incredibly powerful synthetic opioid. Its power dwarfs that of heroin. Over a hundred thousand Americans die every year of fentanyl overdoses. Biden does not care. The border is a fiction. Fentanyl floods into this nation from Mexico all day, every day, and the federal government charged with protecting our citizens watches and does nothing.

During a recent visit to China, Secretary of State Blinken discussed the fentanyl attack on America with the Chinese. That seemed the right thing to do. Fentanyl is cooked in “factories” in Mexico by the drug cartels, but all the precursor chemicals are shipped in from China. After his talks with the Chinese, Blinken advised that in many cases the Chinese were “unaware” that the chemicals they were selling on an industrial scale to drug lords were being used for nefarious purposes. They agreed to form a working group and “study” the problem

Fentanyl is now being mixed with another substance called xylazine. That substance apparently enhances the high you get from using fentanyl. It also destroys your body’s ability to fight infection. Tiny cuts become giant open wounds that never heal. Your body rots away. You can see the impact of xylazine everywhere in Kensington.

The city of Philadelphia, firmly in the grasp of Biden’s Democratic Party, seems largely impotent in the face of an epidemic of overdoses that kills well over a thousand of its residents every year. It offers bereavement counseling to those whose loved ones have died. It dispenses free Narcan via vending machines. Narcan can, if used quickly enough, potentially save the life of someone overdosing on fentanyl.

The city also claims to have launched something called the Drug Market Intervention initiative to shut down open-air drug markets. The city’s 2023 Overdose Response Plan says explicitly that the city will “Disrupt open-air drug markets in Kensington through Drug Market Intervention (DMI) strategy.” I don’t know exactly what that means but it is nowhere in evidence in Kensington.

I visited the area during a recent ‘take back the streets’ initiative involving a whole host of Christian organizations focused on attacking the drug addiction problem head-on and, quite literally, saving souls. There was a significant police presence. Not a single officer I saw was doing anything to combat the open sale and use of drugs. Addicts were literally shooting up in broad daylight with police officers standing not ten feet away.

 

During my visit, there was one matter of intense police interest. The Christian groups present had begun to set up a covering for a band that would be playing. They had apparently failed to obtain precisely the right type of paperwork required. Police officers stepped in immediately to prevent the structure from being completed until this crisis had been resolved.

Five hours later senior officers from Philadelphia police headquarters arrived on site. There were intense discussions. Throughout, addicts continued to use drugs all around. Finally, the decision was made. The band could play. The brass departed.

People continued to inject themselves all around.

This is Biden’s America. Our border is wide open. Drugs flood in and kill our people in numbers that are almost inconceivable. Close to twice as many Americans die every year from fentanyl as died in the entire Vietnam War, and the man who claims to be President doesn’t lift a finger to address the problem.

Meanwhile, it is largely public money that funds the programs that support the status quo on the street. All those discarded syringes are passed out free by non-profits that operate on huge streams of public funding. A pastor I talked to said he estimated $26 million a year of taxpayers’ money was being pumped into the non-profits that do nothing to clean up Kensington but make it possible for this open-air drug market to stay in business.

The logic behind all of this appears to be “judgment-free” assistance. We don’t have the right to step in, arrest people and compel them to seek help. We are it appears instead required to continue to perpetuate the hell in which they live, allow them to destroy a great city and in the process commit what amounts to a particularly hellish form of slow-motion suicide.

This is Kensington. It is also increasingly every American city. This is what three years of this administration have brought us.

Welcome to Biden’s end game, the destruction of America.