If you’ve walked pretty much anywhere in Center City recently, you’ve probably seen people openly unconscious in the middle of a sidewalk, staggering through the streets or passed out in green spaces.
Since the Philadelphia police cleared away encampments in Kensington in March, where more than 100 homeless substance addicts were living, the lack of available beds in local shelters sent people farther south along the I-95 corridor in search of survival.
But those driven out of Kensington represent just one piece of a larger puzzle — that of a skyrocketing number of overdoses and homeless individuals. The culprit is fentanyl, an entirely synthetic opioid that is highly addictive and potent. It is causing more deaths in this city than heroin, and it is part of how opioid addiction is moving from rural areas to urban ones.
Fentanyl or varying fentanyl analogs were connected to 846 of the city’s 1,217 unintentional drug overdoses last year — an increase of more than 95 percent since 2016. These figures come from city government, which is aware of the scale of the problem and is taking a variety of measures to combat it, including filing suit against opioid manufacturers and increasing the availability of treatment. Yet it’s not enough to break a tidal wave of addiction that grows exponentially as it gets closer and closer to our homes and lives.
Philadelphia’s fentanyl likely comes from China, where it is made in labs, for just a few-thousand dollars a pound. While costing about the same as heroin, fentanyl packs a high up to 100 times more powerful. The same goes for the come-down and the subsequent withdrawal.
All of which means that being addicted to fentanyl makes it difficult to hold a job and maintain stable housing. In the city, the fastest-growing homeless population is comprised of LGBTQ individuals under age 25. Forty percent of young homeless people are LGBTQs, many of whom were kicked out of their homes for their sexual orientation.
Philadelphia now enjoys a reputation for a particularly potent and pure strain of fentanyl. It is not clear how many LGBTQ people are caught in the deadly pull of it, but the figures tell us that far too many people on the streets are LGBTQ. They already lack support systems and resources to build healthy lives. The lure of fentanyl may be too much to resist.