Kensington: Inside America’s Largest Open-Air Drug Market

Introduction

Peter Santello creates “videos about a world the media fails to capture” (source). In this video, he travels to Kensington, Philadelphia to speak with a local man named Buddy Osborn, who reached out to him to tell him about “the horrific realities of open-air drug markets.” Buddy and his organization, The Rock, help “to get kids out of crime and drugs and into a healthier environment built upon confidence and clarity.”

Quotes

“We’ll show you McPherson Square. They also named it Needle Park, which is heart-wrenching because it’s really the only place in Kensington where you have an open space.”

“Kensington right now is a tourist attraction for poeple to come and look and see people dying on the streets. And the truth of the matter is they don’t have to die on the streets because there is help … [but] it takes 17 times. You get refused 17 times. That’s the average number before somebody wants to reach out for help, when somebody wants to accept the help.”

“No child should be able to see what they see here. A kid was not born to look at what they see. You got so many kids that are locked behind in houses. They just can’t come out and enjoy their life. They can’t because they’re locked behind in the house because of the post-traumatic stress disorder they’ve developed because of what they’ve seen over the years. It’s horrible.”

“If someone is in agreeance with these policies, please explain how that is compassion, seeing someone passed out with flies on their wounds and letting them rot on the streets.”

“You saw how many people, that was just a handful. There’s dozens and dozens of those examples that you saw laying all over Kensington. That’s somebody’s mother, that’s someone’s father, someone’s daughter, someone’s son. It’s a family member. There’s gotta be some stringent rules that have to be put in place and then they have to respect it.”

“People have the wrong idea about what a rehab actually is. When they go into rehab, they learn about what sent them there in the first place, the dopamine responses, the chemical imbalances, all them technical and stuff like that, but where they really learn how to be recovered.”

“These kids could be standing on the block – moving rock, selling drugs. And now they’re here at a safe haven, safe refuse for these kids.”

“Here’s how it works. When you want to get right, you want to get well, we’ll give you a shower. We’ll put clothes on their back and then we’ll get ’em to a hospital. We’ll get ’em to a detox. We’ll get ’em to a treatment place. We use it [donations] to get people to detox, plane fares, bus fares. Every cent that comes from this tent, that’s a benevolence fund.“