Thirty years ago in Seattle, I was sad to see a homeless man sleeping in a park at the top level of a double slide. It was a nice playground—I could imagine little brothers enjoying a race down that slide—but as things were, parents and kids stayed away.
What I witnessed then was nothing compared to what Michael Powell recently reported in The Atlantic about that same park today:
As I arrived, a drug user squatted next to a child’s slide and relieved himself. Others had set up tents and colonized the park pavilion, where they heated fentanyl on tinfoil and inhaled the fumes with glass pipes. A few went old-school and injected it.
Likewise, I remember Burlington, Vermont, as a beautiful city. But Powell reported the view from City Hall now: “At least 70 users and dealers, many looking hyperkinetic in the way of the strung out.”
He quoted Shabnam Nolan of the King Street Center, where poor children get tutoring: Why does drug users’ “right to ‘dignity’ violate children’s right to come to our center without seeing blood and needles?”
The Burlington Mayor’s Office website warbles about “harm reduction,” which means opening a $2 million center (with funding from the state legislature) so addicts can use their drugs in private. And yet, Powell talked with one mother of three young children who has a fentanyl dealer for a next-door neighbor. “Everyone talks about needle exchange and harm reduction,” she said. “I mean, okay. But it’s like my children and I are living in the zombie apocalypse.”
What Went Wrong in America’s Addiction Recovery Policy?
— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) September 30, 2026
From west to east, many cities are enabling the slow suicide of vulnerable people. How did we get here?https://t.co/AwLD8K0Zkn
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