On September 14^th, the Philadelphia City Council passed an ordinance to prohibit supervised drug consumption sites across most of the city. Outgoing Mayor Jim Kenney is appalled!

Mayor Jim Kenney is vetoing a bill that prohibits supervised injection sites in most of the city

Kenney’s move sends the bill back to City Council, which is poised to override his veto this week and make the legislation law.

by Aubrey Whelan and Anna Orso | Wednesday, September 27, 2023 | 8:00 AM EDT | Updated: 10:42 AM EDT

Mayor Jim Kenney plans to veto legislation that prohibits supervised drug consumption sites across most of Philadelphia, writing in a letter to City Council that the bill is “troublingly anti-science and misleading.”

Kenney’s move will send the bill back to Council, which passed the legislation earlier this month 13-1. Overriding a mayoral veto requires a two-thirds vote, so Council is poised to make the legislation law during its scheduled meeting Thursday.

Despite Kenney’s veto, the passage of the bill greatly imperils the future of supervised drug consumption sites, which the city calls “overdose prevention centers,” in Philadelphia.

The facilities are places where people can use drugs under medical supervision and be revived if they overdose. Kenney announced in 2018 that his administration would permit, but not fund, the opening of one in Philadelphia, but some residents from neighborhoods hit hardest by public drug use and overdoses have protested against it, saying they fear the sites will bring more people to their communities to use drugs.

His Honor the Mayor, like District Attorney Larry Krasner, appears to be oblivious to the fact that drug users aren’t just hurting themselves, but committing other crimes, primarily theft, to support drug habits that they cannot afford themselves without crime. More they support and enable the drug dealers, the violent criminals who have led to the huge explosion in homicide in the City of Brotherly Love.

That Mr Kenney has vetoed legislation, a veto which will almost certainly be overridden, is not something which would have ordinarily inspired me to write about it, were it not for another article, from several days ago, in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Germany’s open-air drug market remains a vibrant community space. What can Philly learn from it?

Berlin has prevented drug use from taking over its public spaces. Here are several factors that may explain why.

by Max Marin | Friday, September 22, 2023 | 7:00 AM EDT

BERLIN — When I arrived in the German capital this summer, anxiety was boiling over a violent, open-air drug market that sounded oddly familiar to my Philadelphia ear.

Görlitzer Park had become the subject of a fierce public debate after a 27-year-old woman was raped by several men in July. For years, some said that leaders in Berlin had stood idly by as drug dealing, violent crime, and lawlessness enveloped the park. And Görli, as the locals call it, had now become a place to avoid, according to people quoted in the Berlin press.

Given that description, part of me was bracing for a German version of Kensington. When I arrived at the edge of the massive 35-acre meadow in Berlin’s trendy Kreuzberg district, for a second, I thought it fit the bill. Groups of dealers openly hustled cocaine, heroin, and weed at the park gates.

But the Philly déjà vu only lasted a few seconds.

Inside Görli, scenes of summer life blossomed: immigrant families barbecuing, kids playing pickup soccer games, punks clinking pilsners on the grass, and (because it’s Berlin) no less than two random DJs spinning techno to anyone who would listen.

It was a neat microcosm of the international life and social tolerance for which the German capital is famous. But to my Philadelphia brain, it also felt like a daydream — something unimaginable in Kensington, where a billion-dollar drug trade had long upended the social order in places like McPherson Square, a six-acre park in the heart of the neighborhood.

There follows a lengthy opinion column in which the reporter, Max Marin, tells us how Germany deals with recreational drug use, primarily through decriminalization, and treating drug abuse and addiction as a public health crisis, spending far more resources to harm reduction practices and inpatient treatment options, in part to the nation’s universal health-care system.

Görli is now one of seven designated crime hot spots where police have the authority to conduct “stop-and-frisk”-style searches — a legal zone critics have said gives law enforcement carte blanche to racially profile people of color in the park. But as in Philadelphia, police crackdowns have proven incapable of addressing the root problems.

What police crackdowns? Where and when were the police crackdowns in Kensington, in Strawberry Mansion, in any of the poorer Philadelphia neighborhoods in which drug use is rampant? Kensington is simply the most famous and most blatant in its open air drug markets than other neighborhoods, but it’s not as though junkies in West Philly have to make it to Allegheny Avenue to score some snack. We noted, just a few days ago, how 12-year-old Hezekiah Bernard, allegedly a drug dealer even at that young age, got shot in the back of the head, allegedly by Tysheer Hankinson, a 16-year-old who was, purportedly, young Mr Bernard’s older partner-in-crime, himself a previous gunshot victim, and now a victim of some form of street justice, all in West Philly, a long way from Kensington.

But Mr Marin’s commentary ignores one problem that is obvious in Kensington: the thousands and thousands of junkies there are basically human waste cases, a term I don’t like to use, but am unable to think of something quite as accurate, people who cannot even hope to hold a job, people who cannot support themselves other than by crime, people who would, in any European nation, be nothing but welfare malingerers.

Germany’s ‘solution’ to open air drug markets has been to tolerate them, to try to hem them into ‘safe areas,’ as opposed to the public streets as in Philly, but while that might make the surrounding areas safer, it doesn’t do anything to get these wastrels off of drugs, doesn’t do anything to enable them to support themselves.

At a minimum, (Bill McKinney, the executive director of the nonprofit New Kensington Community Development Corporation) said, Philly officials could do more to prioritize equal access to public spaces. “If the standard is that we are cool about drug sales in parks, then they should be allowed in all parks,” not just those in Kensington, he told me. “That will push us towards solutions because that gets the attention of the people in power.”

That’s exactly what 11 out of 12 city councilmen voted against, listening to the words and the will of their constituents, that they do not want more magnets for the junkies in ‘safe injection sites.’ Remember: the (supposedly) more innocent drugs, primarily marijuana, aren’t injected. The “overdose prevention centers” are for the drugs on which people can overdose, and those users are the junkies. Who wants to see them wandering around, in various states of stupor, or sleeping it off in their residential sidewalks . . . if not their front porches?

But McKinney is right: Both cities should nonetheless always be looking for ways to help the people affected by them — more drug treatment, housing, and alternative employment for the people involved in the drug trade — rather than simply declaring victory if and when the problem moves next door.

“(A)lternative employment for the people involved in the drug trade”? Those people are either junkies, who can’t hold a job, or dealers, who are criminals, people who’ve led lives of crime and violence, and who aren’t going to be happy with working as an assistant manager at a Bojangles chicken joint.

“(H)ousing”? Who’s going to want to rent an apartment to someone who’s dirty and going to do nothing but drool and poop on the floors as they’re strung out on something? Which landlords are going to volunteer to be responsible for the upkeep on units with addicts who can’t hold jobs or clean up after themselves living therein, especially in a city in which the political left are trying to prohibit evictions?

The only real answer is law enforcement, strict law enforcement, law enforcement which puts users in jail at least until they’ve detoxed, and then requires them to get drug treatment, with frequent testing, or sends them back to jail. The dealers themselves need to be locked up for as long as the law allows, with charges stacked on top of charges, and sentences run consecutively, to tell the next group of wannabe gang-bangers and thugs that, if they get caught, their prison cred will be pretty much useless if they don’t get out until they’re old and grey.
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