Philadelphia is becoming a ‘mecca’ for heroin addicts

Daniel Jaje, 23, is a self-decribed heroin addict. “We all wanted samples,” Jaje said. After he got his packet, he melted the powder in a spoon. He was afraid it might be laced with Fentanyl. “It mixed up dark,” he said, a sign to him the heroin wasn’t adulterated. “For me it was really intense,” Jaje said. “It was pretty good actually.”

Christina Gambrill, 31, who says she is addicted to heroin, sleeps under the Emerald Street bridge with her boyfriend. “I can’t worry about America when I can’t even worry about this bridge,” Gambrill said, as she put on makeup.

An anti-drug message on a fence in North Philadelphia, where there is a growing heroin problem.

Danny Hinkie, 44, who says he is a heroin addict, grew up near the the corner of Kensington Avenue and Somerset in North Philadelphia. “They ain’t gonna do nothing for us,” he said. Hinkie said he occasionally finds work as a carpet cleaner for a friend’s company. Next week he’ll be cleaning carpets at a hotel that will be housing people arriving for the Democratic National Convention. Maureen Schilling, 63, left, a bartender at Bentley’s Place, says she has “seen it all.”

A few blocks off Kensington Avenue, Dave Adcox sprays grime off the sidewalk in front of his house with a fire hose streaming water from a hydrant on the corner. Adcox, 40, regularly finds drug needles in the strip of weeds on the edge of his yard.

Dave Parke, a transit police sergeant, tries to help a man get to a bus stop beneath an elevated train line that runs through a neglected crescent of north Philadelphia that cops call “The Badlands.”

Many of the city’s heroin addicts hang out in the Kensington area of North Philadelphia. Angie Soprano, 38, says she is addicted to heroin.