The Northeast Times in their editorial this week notes that the NorthEast Treatment Centers plans to open a methadone treatment facility at Roosevelt Boulevard and Grant Avenue. We sympathize with their concerns. Treating people with drug addiction can be a challenge.
Addicts have no constitutional right to get their fix in the middle of a stable and decent neighborhood in a stable and decent section of Philadelphia. The rights of immediate neighbors as well as those in the entire Northeast to live without an influx of drug addicts far outweighs the right of those addicts to get treatment in a neighborhood that does not want them.
I have to commend those folks in Bustleton for somehow having managed to exist without having any drug addicts living among them. It is truly an amazing story that I have referred to Matt Drudge for investigation. You have a good population up there and not even one druggy.
Or could it be there there are folks up there who are drug addicts and maybe you would rather have them treated elsewhere. You know, send them to some down and out section of the city, send them to Frankford?
Certain sections of Philadelphia may be down and out, but dragging the Northeast down with them would be patently unfair. It won’t happen if Bustleton residents have their say – and if the politicians back them up.
It might be more unfair if other sections of the city have to bear the burden of your drug addicts. So let’s get to the bottom of this, once and for all. If the clients who will use the facility come from your neighborhood, they are yours. Keep them. We have enough of them now. And if we find we have some of them down here with us, in the “down and outs”, we’re sending them back.
Read the entire editorial here.
