TLP Weekend Edition (February 15-16, 2025)
What we’re reading and checking out.
📖 “Inside the East Coast’s Largest Open-Air Drug Market,” by Charles Fain Lehman in City Journal. How do you clean up an open-air drug market? Good question! Charles Fain Lehman tackles this issue in a terrific article on the open-air drug market in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. In the process, he explains the sociology and economics of such markets and why it's so darn hard to get rid of them. Sobering but essential reading.
To close the market, they’ll need to arrest as many dealers as possible, as instantaneously as possible. Anything less risks the drug trade reemerging, hydra-like, in short order.
Tackling supply is only part of the equation. Hundreds of addicts, from the city and the surrounding region, create demand. And while shutting down supply will deter their consumption, separately intervening to reduce that demand will help the supply-side intervention stick....
Clearing out dealers and users would do a lot to impede the market. But the market is also entangled with the built environment of Kensington, from empty buildings and vacant lots to the de facto “supervised” consumption sites that spring up from time to time. Restoring Kensington as a neighborhood means giving its non-drug-selling residents a sense of control over the space. Clearing and greening vacant lots, tearing down empty and condemned houses, increasing street lighting, and ensuring that streets remain clean may all seem like minor details. But the only way to suppress the market is to replace it with something else: a functional neighborhood.
All this is, to put it mildly, a heavy lift. The city will need support from the state and federal governments. Leaders at these levels may not want to make Kensington their concern—even if, by refusing, they let the situation worsen...Kensington is everybody’s issue. A hub for drug dealing, particularly of this size, becomes a locus for drug use in the surrounding region. Clearing it out will yield benefits for Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware. That’s reason enough for intragovernmental collaboration to scale up.
📝 “Thirty Years of Slipping the Leash,” by the Blue Dogs. On the Welcome Stack, the five leaders of the House Blue Dogs lay out their philosophy and theory of what the Democratic Party should be going forward. The rest of the party should take note:
In an increasingly hegemonic world where power resides everywhere and nowhere, we argue for a representative government. This shouldn’t be revolutionary, but it feels like it at this time. We fight for localism, not in service of narrow self interest, but out of recognition that good federal policy can only be achieved when a wide diversity of interests are reflected at the table. In short, you don’t get good policy when people who are turning wrenches, changing diapers, and driving trucks aren’t at the negotiating table.
Today the three Blue Dog co-chairs are all Mexican Americans, somewhat a coincidence of the diversity of our coalition as it exists today. All five of the Blue Dog leaders represent primarily working-class districts, where many of our constituents own small businesses in the trades and have felt disrespected and disregarded by the regulatory system as it exists. In order to hold an electoral majority, Democrats must prioritize serving and respecting communities like ours.
📚 Stone’s Fall, by Iain Pears. Picked this one up in a used book store for five bucks. If you like historical fiction this book is for you. Good reading and a heady mystery from the twentieth century in London to France and Italy in the nineteenth century:
At his London home, John Stone falls out of a window to his death. A financier and arms dealer, Stone was a man so wealthy that he was able to manipulate markets, industries, and indeed entire countries and continents. Did he jump, was he pushed, or was it merely a tragic accident? His alluring and enigmatic widow hires a young crime reporter to investigate. The story moves backward in time—from London in 1909 to Paris in 1890 and finally to Venice in 1867—and the attempts to uncover the truth play out against the backdrop of the evolution of high-stakes international finance, Europe’s first great age of espionage, and the start of the twentieth century’s arms race. Stone’s Fall is a tale of love and frailty, as much as it is of high finance and skulduggery. The mixture, then, as now, is an often fatal combination.
📺 “Tehran,” on Apple TV+. This show follows a Mossad agent, Tamar, who smuggles herself into the country's capital to help Israel carry out a massive operation. When the mission goes sideways, Tamar ends up stranded in a hostile country, fleeing both the Iranian counterintelligence officials trying to capture her and the Mossad team trying to bring her home before she has a chance to complete her assignment. Set in present day Iran, the show also gives viewers a look at what life is like there, from Tamar's interactions with ordinary Iranian civilians to underground desert raves with young people to run-ins with student-backed affiliates of Hezbollah. Season 3 is coming out soon on Apple TV+.
🎸 Robert’s Western World. TLP took in the Father John Misty show at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville last night and spent some quality pre-show time at this classic honky tonk on Broadway. Coors Banquet and live traditional country is just what the doctor ordered to usher in the weekend. Some nice soul name Jack put together an excellent ten hour playlist of the music you’d hear at Robert’s at 4 on a weekend afternoon. Enjoy people!
"Clearing out dealers and users would do a lot to impede the market. But the market is also entangled with the built environment of Kensington, from empty buildings and vacant lots to the de facto “supervised” consumption sites that spring up from time to time. Restoring Kensington as a neighborhood means giving its non-drug-selling residents a sense of control over the space. Clearing and greening vacant lots, tearing down empty and condemned houses, increasing street lighting, and ensuring that streets remain clean may all seem like minor details. But the only way to suppress the market is to replace it with something else: a functional neighborhood."
Guess what. In the functional neighborhood known as downtown Portland, Oregon, which has no empty or condemned houses, enjoys abundant street lighting, clean streets and fenced-off vacant lots, the Portland Clinic recently moved out of its fine facility because the City of Portland and the Portland Police Bureau were unable to suppress the nearby open-air drug market. The Clinic's physicians were sent to other locations in the western suburbs, thereby significantly lengthening patients' travel time. I have been a patient of the downtown clinic since the late 70s, so this develoment has me rather annoyed.
Oregonians are paying the hefty price of having been hoodwinked into being guinea pigs for the Drug Policy Alliance's agenda to demolish laws criminalizing drug possession nationwide. Decriminalization was a disaster for the addict community (LOL) and Portland's decent and hard-working voter-taxpayers. Unfortunately, the same bleeding heart mentality that made decriminalization so appealing also made a hash of the policymaking that accompanied the repeal of decriminalization. Oregon's progressive legislators pretended to craft a solution that would ensure those caught in possession of drugs would go to rehab, and drug users pretended to believe it. The fact is that few arrests are being made and even fewer of those arrested are taking the off-ramp to sobriety. Meanwhile millions of dollars are wasted in service of a harm reduction culture that stigmatizes getting clean and abets addiction in the deluded belief that addicts possess both personal autonomy and the wisdom to know when they're ready to quit.
Thanks for the news about season 3 of "Tehran" on Apple TV. It is a terrific series.