The Hatboro Blues

I grew up in the the same neighborhood just a few years prior from the author. It gave me chills reading this because I had such an incredibly similar experience with drugs. I saw a lot of my friends die or disappear into the city while their white upper-middle class families had no idea and were devastated to learn their seemingly healthy son or daughter's body was found rotting in an abandoned building. I got wasted in the same woods he did just a few years before. I knew the same homeless man he mentioned. I'm sure my old forty bottles and graffiti were in the backdground of his experience.

I think about it all the time - how lucky I am that myself or my brother stayed just one step away from heroin addiction. Like the author I tried percs early on with my drug experimentation and hated the feeling. I was more into uppers. Just a few years after I graduated, early on in the opioid epidemic, a lot of friends and old classmates just started dying. I remember one month in particular I must have went to a dozen funerals several of which were close friends. I would see people like coworkers, bosses, teachers, and second cousins at some of these funerals whom I had no clue knew this person. There was a weird reckoning of community grieving. I once lied about being sick to call out of work for a funeral only to then see my boss across the room during the service crying uncontrollably. I asked how she knew [Sara] who was good friend of mine. It turns out she was her neighbor and basically helped raise her. It was surreal.

That one month was horrible and looking back I wonder if this was one of the first times fentanyl started circulating around the community. So many people who were closet heroin users or light "party" smoker/snort users perished all in the same two weeks or so. Of course this was before we knew about fentanyl being sold as heroin or cut into it.

I graduated Hatboro-Horsham in 1998, and heroin was a problem even then in my larger friend circle (and I was a big sheltered nerd who lived in Horsham), due to the proximity to Philly (the "heroin capital of the US" at the time). One girl OD'd after I went to college. The school itself was pretty great academically and otherwise, as far as public high schools go, but the really good teachers were older and many retired I think, in the 2000s. From what I've heard, a combo of NCLB and 'zero tolerance' policies turned the school into kind of a hellhole (like many other schools at the time).

This is like reading the story of my time in highschool, except Philadelphia was Austin and I was just watching but never using anything stronger than Everclear and Surge.

Thinking about all the people that I grew up with that are either dead, in prison or hopeless addicts makes me despair for the wasteland that is most of the USA. Those born and raised urban and middle class just don't know...

I believe the name of this article is a reference to this site and the accompanying book, about the part of North Philly he describes: https://kensingtonblues.com/

Really compelling story. As someone that grew up as stupid and bored as the people in the article but not at all with such easy supply from such a young age I'm very thankful for that now.

I graduated from Hatboro-Horsham in 2011.

The author here was in my grade, and we hung out a few times. I've read this before, but still it amazes me how much of a difference the Hatboro side of town is from the Horsham side.

I grew up in a decent neighborhood, but still got into petty trouble. Hearing the stories from those in Hatboro makes it seem like a such a different world, despite being only a few miles away.

Feel free to ask questions, although my experience differs from the authors.

My home town and my cohort. AMA.