Joshua wakes up at 5:30 a.m. to the sound of a running subway. His hands and legs ache from his heroin ulcers, a product of 18 years of addiction. His back aches from the uncomfortable bench bars; he is used to both.
There aren’t any other clothes to change into.
He walks past the morning foot traffic to the Wawa on 6th and Chestnut Street. The workers know him, so his coffee is free. When the workers aren’t looking, his breakfast sandwich is also free.
He enjoys his coffee, sandwich, and cigarette as he walks four blocks up to 10th Street for his methadone treatment.
“It’s like a safer form of [heroin],” he says. “[But] you’re not getting high on it.” Whatever withdrawals he still has, he makes up for with a hit of heroin later. He receives one-on-one counseling twice a week, but today is not one of those days.
With the extra time, he relaxes in the Starbucks on the same block. He plugs in his free, welfare-provided phone and opens Facebook to watch his favorite anime, One Piece. He’s on episode 1065, but his excitement about Luffy’s rematch with Rob Lucci brought him to YouTube for intentional spoilers. When he’s done with One Piece, he plays Monopoly Go! Or Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp.
Then he panhandles on the street. He usually sits in front of the GIANT heirloom market on 8th and Market Street. He isn’t allowed in there since he was caught stealing food, but a few kind passers-by purchase a snack for him or hand him some cash.
On an average day, he makes about 20 to 30 dollars. “Food and cigarettes. That’s the end of it… [the drugs] are usually free,” Joshua says.
Other passersby aren’t as kind. “I was sitting here with my sign, and a f*cking dude came by and kicked it off my foot. ‘Go get a f*cking job,’ [he said]. I said, ‘If I wasn’t f*cking injured, I would…’ It’s not that I don’t want to work. It’s that I can’t use my hands.” These alterations are common for Joshua. “A lot of people nowadays grew up with a silver spoon in their mouth. They haven’t known what it’s like to struggle.”
It’s late in the afternoon, and the drugs are his next destination. He hops on the Market Frankford Line to Kensington for his daily dosage. He knows the dealers, so the drugs are free. Sometimes, though, they cost a favor. “Like standing at the corner, letting them know if cops are coming… then I could choose if I want them to pay me in cash or drugs… I usually choose half and half.”
Joshua isn’t alone. In 2022, Philadelphia had a total of 1,413 overdose deaths, along with many more Philadelphians abusing illicit drugs. The majority of these deaths include fentanyl, a highly potent opioid that is sometimes added to heroin. The drug problem is common with Philadelphia’s homeless population, with 83% of homeless Philadelphians abusing or depending on drugs or alcohol.
It’s about 6 p.m., so Josh returns to Center City to be a doorman at Wawa for extra change. After about an hour, he orders his go-to meatball sub and gets ready to find a subway station for the night. When he finds one, he waits until the SEPTA worker leaves, and hops the turnstile to find a bench.
“If you don’t have a good foundation in the home when you step out that door, there’s a whole world out there.”
Rodney
“Josh is a good man, just like everybody else is a good man,” Rodney says, a recovering addict currently staying in a recovery home. “I can’t judge none of these guys because I’ve been there with them.”
According to Rodney, addiction starts from home. “If you don’t have a good foundation in the home when you step out that door, there’s a whole world out there.”
Joshua lacked that foundation. His parents often enabled his addiction, and his mother used drugs in front of him. His mother was a nurse who worked with cancer patients. Josh’s father was a mechanic and owned a pizza shop. After suffering from injuries, both were prescribed OxyContin as a painkiller, and their addiction grew from there.
Joshua suffered a similar fate after breaking his knee skateboarding. With progressively stronger doses of Percocets followed by an abrupt cutoff, Josh realized that he was hooked on them and started buying them from the street.
“[My parents] were drug addicts. So they understood how it was like when you don’t have it, the sickness comes on. They knew how it felt, and so they didn’t want me to feel like it… Growing up watching them do it was one thing, but then getting older and then having them give it to me, that’s a whole other thing.”
