A One-Man Stand Against Philadelphia’s Opioid Crisis
I visited Kensington and Allegheny, one of the epicenters of the drug epidemic, with a friend trying to help people trapped by addiction.
Looking for a helping hand.
Photographer: Frank Barry for Bloomberg
In this series, Frank Barry is retracing his 2020 Winnebago trip across America on the Lincoln Highway, the nation’s oldest transcontinental route. That adventure, which eventually became a book , focused on finding a way forward for a divided country. This time around, he’ll be revisiting some of the issues he examined, and some of the people he met, to learn what’s changed — and whether there is now more or less hope about the future.
The Lincoln Highway runs through Trenton and into Philadelphia, where I meet up with Jim Spengler, a friend I’d last seen when my wife Laurel and I drove this route four years ago. Back then, he told me of how he and a few neighbors had begun making sandwiches and giving them to people living on the street.