Philadelphia: Heroin Hellscape
February 21st, 2017Via: Philly News:
Along a half-mile gorge cut by a Conrail line that runs through Kensington and Fairhill, tens of thousands of used syringes and their tossed off orange caps cover the sloping ground like a plague of locusts. The contaminated needles make conditions so hazardous that even some police officers are reluctant to traverse the embankments to get to dead overdose victims at the bottom.
The squalor and chaos along the rail line resembles a scene from Hieronymus Bosch. Addicts – many with needle marks so fresh that still-drying blood glistens in the sun – twist their bodies into unnatural forms to crouch and teeter on the trash-covered banks as they shoot up. Others sleep under nearby bridges or in makeshift shelters surrounded by garbage, drugs, and death.
At a plywood shack known to denizens as “the hospital,” users too squeamish to inject themselves can pay a few dollars to a Ray-Ban-wearing addict who looks like he stepped out of a Mad Max movie.
“People come here when they have trouble to hit themselves,” said the 45-year-old man, who declined to give his real name. “So I hit them in the neck, you know what I mean? So I’m like the doctor. So they pay me.”
This apocalyptic terrain, sometimes called El Campamento, is home to 75 to 125 addicts at any given time. Many more transient users come each day to get high. It is the festering epicenter of Philadelphia’s heroin epidemic, a benighted territory the DEA considers the East Coast’s largest heroin market, smack dab in an area often referred to as the Badlands. And it has gone largely ignored for three decades.
Stories such as this really drive it home why you don’t want to mess around with heroin, not even once. And if these accounts aren’t enough to steer a person away from that crap, then this fact should do the trick: The window between the amount of heroin it takes to get you all nice and high and the amount it takes to end your life is really very narrow. This is especially true with today’s ultra-potent heroin. (Thanks, war on drugs!)
There’s an elephant tranquiliser drifting around that made the news in Australia recently which is so strong it can actually kill via skin contact. Was wondering if it’s what did in Kim Jong Un’s bro’.
VX
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-39073389
Kim Jong-nam killing: VX nerve agent ‘found on his face’
@Kevin.
Thanks 🙂
I was outside BBQing last night, just gazing into the smoke and sausages, when the thought came to me, “It was VX.”
And I chuckled to myself, and said, “No way.” haha