Tranq Tourism - Kensington's Exploitation Epidemic
“Take this down. It’s sad, and she’s not fully capable.”
Tranq Tourism - Kensington, Philadelphia's Exploitation Epidemic
A new drug called ‘tranq’, or xylazine, has been a big problem on Philadelphia’s streets for the last few years. But now, there seems to be a bigger problem. Content creators have been coming into places like Kensington, a suburb badly impacted by the epidemic, and filming substance users without their consent or for small sums of money. Sometimes, these people are barely conscious. We traveled to Kensington in North Philadelphia to find out what was happening, and to speak to people who run these channels.
I came across a TikTok earlier this summer about a new drug in Philadelphia that claimed to “turn people into zombies.” Fascinated, I watched it the whole way through, and soon my feed became full of similar content.
The videos, documenting people on the streets in a suburb called Kensington, were pretty disturbing; they showed users reeling from the strength of this new synthetic opioid, with large open wounds on their bodies, struggling to walk.
What struck me the most, though, were the thousands of comments on the videos. YouTube, Instagram and TikTok users were constantly asking about the ethics of the filming and questioning why the people behind the camera had the right to exploit substance users in this way.
“Bro, why film this and upload it. So gross of you.”
“This is absolutely disgusting of the person posting this. Quit exploiting these poor people. Shame on you!”
“Take this down. It’s sad, and she’s not fully capable.”
The comments became my way into the story, and the phenomenon we coined “tranq tourism.”
Tranq, also known as xylazine, is a powerful sedative that the FDA has only approved for veterinary use. It is often mixed with fentanyl, a highly potent substance, and has been labeled the “deadliest drug threat the US has ever faced.”
Philadelphia, a city with a long history of substance abuse and disorder, became ground zero for this drug around the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. Walking down the streets in Kensington, mainly the avenue under the train bridge, you really start to see this.
Hundreds of people sit or struggle to stand upright in the doors of shops or restaurants that have long since closed. It was hard to get down the road because so many were lying on the floor. There were discarded used needles everywhere and ropes that had once been used to tie on people’s arms so they could shoot up.
Savage Sisters, the organization I profiled in this documentary, sits in the heart of this area, with open doors welcoming people who are otherwise on the streets all day. The organization is entirely funded by donations and gets no state funding.
As we sat in the Savage Sisters storefront, we heard about two or three people coming in who’d recently taken money from content creators to be in their videos.
These users hadn’t been paid more than twenty dollars and said they’d been made to say things that weren’t necessarily true for the money and the camera.
I interviewed two content creators, Jeff and Mr Work, who film substance users in Kensington as part of their social media series. Both earn money from their channels but Jeff, unlike Mr Work, reinvests the profits he makes off of his series ‘Jeffs High on Life’ back into the community.
While we were there, Sarah Laurel, the founder of Savage Sisters, took note of their stories and logged them into her new helpline system, which assists users on the streets featured in viral videos. She told us she believes the videos are exploitative and that the stigmatizing nature of them has a direct impact on the resources allocated to the tranq epidemic. People in the videos are often referred to as 'zombies', and Sarah says that the verbiage around substance addiction needs to change for the resources coming into Philadelphia to change.