Kensington Beach:

Loss and Survival on the Streets of Philadelphia

A Memoir

By Budd Michael Rodney

Budd’s life was built on a foundation of order and discipline, following his father’s footsteps into a career in corrections. But beneath the uniform, a relentless addiction was tearing his world apart, brick by agonizing brick. 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 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 “hitter,” a street doctor paid in drugs and cash to inject others who could no longer find their own veins.

Kensington Beach is an unflinching, first-hand account of a world most people only glimpse through their car windows, the internet, or TV.. It is 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 fire of desperation. It is a story of enduring brutal street violence, near-fatal…

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