Effective Harm Reduction Requires Partnerships, Not Prohibition

Savage Sisters mobile outreach van, photo courtesy of  Georgiana Constantinescu

“Do you wish you worked in an office or something?” a rookie volunteer asked me as we were picking up wet garbage and syringes off Somerset Ave. 

It was 11:45 pm on a Tuesday evening. We had a line of 50 people to serve, police lights pouring a dancing hue of flashing colors bouncing off the buildings, while simultaneously, ambulance sirens echoed down the Ave. 

No, I prefer it here. I feel safer here, with my friends, in this neighborhood, more than I ever felt in City Hall, in a board room, or meeting with a politician. I spent years walking these streets, feet covered in blisters, numbed out in a haze of drugs. Since 2017, I have been in recovery, living and working in the same area, with the same people. Same streets, just a different lane. 

When I first began my work in harm reduction, I believed elected officials would help ‘if they only knew.’ I naively thought it was a lack of knowledge. I have learned, after countless meetings, press conferences, failed strategies, and a change of the guard, that our leaders are absolutely aware of what is happening and simply have a different agenda. 

What Harm Reduction Really Means vs. Political Narratives

Harm reduction works to lower potential short and long-term risks associated with substances, sex, and health. The work we do at my nonprofit, Savage Sisters, is for people who use recreationally, people who have substance use disorder, sex workers, those who are unhoused or housing-insecure, and people seeking recovery. At Savage, disease prevention, access to healthcare, safer supplies, housing, autonomy, and basic human kindness are pillars of the work. 

For the past year, harm reduction has been bastardized in the media. Public health has been highly politicized and debated rather than reviewed with evidence and used to promote health within our communities. 

Local politicians have diminished the work by caving to real estate developers, creating an aggressive and inflammatory situation by pitting residents against the unhoused and harm reductionists. It was an intentional move by the city. If we are too busy fighting each other, we can’t possibly hold them accountable for decades of dereliction of duty. 

We’ve seen new construction projects receive approval just months after the launch of city initiatives supposedly aimed at reducing violence and overdoses in Kensington. In 2021, Bill McKinney, Executive Director of New Kensington CDC, wrote about this in an op-ed critical of former Mayor Kenney’s Operation Resilience. 

McKinney noted, “If you review the real estate records along Kensington Avenue, you will also see that coinciding with the clearing of the encampments was a massive influx of developers buying properties, which still remain vacant and a blight on the community. As with clearing the Conrail encampment, there was no real plan. People who had been living in the area spread across the community.”

We saw this phenomenon repeat itself in May 2024 after an encampment sweep in Kensington as part of Mayor Parker’s Kensington Community Revival plan, which simply relocated more unhoused folks to nearby side streets — which are heavily residential — rather than getting people to treatment and recovery services.

The City’s Ban on Mobile Units Isn’t Effective

In May 2025, the Philadelphia City Council passed a bill, sponsored by Councilmember Quetcy Lozada, which requires permits for all mobile service providers working in the 7th District. Bill No. 240665-AA is not a full ban, but a tightly regulated system that limits when, where, and how mobile outreach units may operate in Kensington. The law also imposes strict time, place, and manner restrictions, limiting our operations to 11:00 pm through 6:00 am, and forcing us to relocate 1000 feet away every 45 minutes. If we’re not compliant, fines can reach $1000. 

Thus, we now find ourselves serving at midnight on a Tuesday. This new ban offers a multitude of complications. Attempting to get someone into treatment at midnight is nearly impossible. It takes about 18-25 minutes for an ambulance to arrive. Getting volunteers out at this hour is another difficulty, especially doctors and nurses. Street-side wound care, under the stars, isn’t ideal. Organizations like ours that partially depend on volunteers to help us operate are simply out of luck.  

As I stand on the corner of Kensington Ave, I watch a new BMW pull up, and a young girl gets in. I get a glimpse of the driver, a middle-aged white man. I used to sit on Hazzard Street early in the morning to distribute safer sex kits to those working, and it was a similar scene. Nice cars, men from the collar counties, before and after work, stopping by to pay for pleasure before heading home to their wives and kids. 

I used to chuckle at the bumper stickers advertising their school districts. The Central Bucks logo, the Lower Merion football sticker, etc. This is how disease spreads, and this is why disease prevention benefits the entire region. Harm reduction lowers the risk to the population. I challenge you to zoom out from the lens of addiction and consider the bigger ripple effect we are trying to address. Only 48% of the people we serve are from Philly. The rest of the folks we help are from Bucks, Montgomery, Delaware, and Camden Counties.

Criminalizing Drug Use Doesn’t Work. Philadelphia Should Adopt These Solutions Instead

Members of the Savage Sisters outreach team in Kensington during the daytime. Photo courtesy of Georgiana Constantinescu

You cannot ban homelessness. You cannot make poverty a crime. You cannot arrest every person selling or buying drugs. It’s a huge market, it’s built on demand. If the trillion-dollar drug war has taught us anything, it’s that we have lost. We need safe spaces for people, we need safe supply, and we need the ability to provide healthcare and supplies in the daylight. If the city won’t fund or support it openly, the least they can do is remove logistical hurdles planted to avert disease prevention, life-saving medical services, safer supplies, and low-barrier access to care. 

Philadelphia must eliminate the ban on mobile outreach in Kensington while keeping the permitting system in place. The current restrictions — forcing teams to operate only at midnight, in 45-minute intervals, and at two police-surveilled sites — are not just impractical, they’re dangerous. Lawmakers know that as long as an open-air drug market thrives in Kensington, people using substances aren’t leaving. That reality makes this bill either empty political theater, meant to create the illusion of action, or something worse: a deliberate attempt to cut people off from the very services that keep them alive.

A better path is obvious. Expand the permitting system so registered providers can collaborate with first responders and city agencies. That kind of coordination would bring real, measurable progress. Instead, leaders have already worked to undermine harm reduction infrastructure. In 2024, Councilmember Quetzy Lozada even admitted to pressuring our landlord, Shift Capital, not to renew Savage Sisters’ lease for our Kensington drop-in center. 

That center provided wound care, showers, and direct links to recovery, and helped hundreds of people leave the streets with the support of programs like Police Assisted Diversion (PAD), which connected substance users to services instead of arresting them for drug crimes. These are the types of collaborations that save lives and strengthen communities.

The city’s justification for this ban — that residents don’t want to see unhoused people with substance use disorder, overdosing, and having their children be subjected to that trauma, outside their homes — ignores an important distinction. People aren’t gathering for wound care or showers; they are there because of the open-air drug market. Blocking outreach doesn’t change that reality. It only strips vulnerable people of the safety net they desperately need. If Philadelphia truly wants change, it won’t come through dangerous bans — it will come through cooperation, compassion, and evidence-based solutions.

I call on Philadelphians to step back from the historically imprinted stigmatized lens and consider that maybe, if we revisit harm reduction, together as a whole, we can truly find healing. Serving isn’t always easy; we don’t ask you to do it. But let us, the experts, do what we know actually works. Because we are all worth saving.