Kensington Beach: Loss and Survival on the Streets of Philadelphia

He was a correctional officer who upheld the law. Then he became a homeless addict in America's largest open-air drug market.

After getting clean, Budd followed his father into a career of order and discipline—and for a time, it held. But beneath the uniform, a relapse into relentless addiction began tearing his world apart. In a harrowing descent, he lost everything: his job, his family's trust, and finally, his home.

He ended up on the streets of Kensington, Philadelphia—a neighborhood ravaged by fentanyl and a new, flesh-eating drug called "tranq." His slow suicide was broadcast to the world through live-feed YouTube cameras, a modern-day hell where he became a full-time "hitter," a street doctor paid in drugs and cash to inject others who could no longer find their own veins.

Through it all was Britiny—his friend, then girlfriend, a woman fighting her own demons as the two clung to each other while the world closed in around them. Their love was messy, fierce, and often destructive, a bond forged in withdrawal, violence, and the small, stolen moments of tenderness that kept them alive. Together, they navigated the unspoken rules of Kensington’s underworld, sometimes saving each other, sometimes dragging each other deeper, but never letting go.

After years on the street, Budd wakes up in a hospital bed with a choice that will alter him forever: months of grueling surgeries to save his frostbitten feet, or a bilateral amputation that offers the only sure path to walking again.

Most people who write about Kensington only observed it. Budd lived it from every angle—as a man paid to uphold the law, as a man the law forgot, and finally as a man who had to decide whether what was left of him was worth saving.

Kensington Beach is an unflinching, first-hand account of a world most people only glimpse through their car windows, the internet, or TV—a journey into the heart of the American opioid crisis, where unspoken rules govern a community of ghosts and fierce loyalties are forged in the fires of desperation. It is a scream for help from a place where so many have fallen silent, a raw and intimate look at the bonds of love and survival, and a testament to the brutal, beautiful, and often contradictory nature of hitting rock bottom. This is what happens when you lose everything—including parts of yourself—and are forced to find a reason to live again.

This powerful and visceral memoir is for readers of Beautiful Boy , Tweak, Hillbilly Elegy , and Dopesick , and for anyone seeking to understand the human face of a crisis that is consuming our nation, one soul at a time.