In Philadelphia's Kensington neighborhood, heroin is far from 'chic'

Guillermo A. Santos on his high school graduation day in 2021, with his father, Guillermo Jose Santos. The elder Santos died later the same year of a drug overdose. (The Santos-Honkala Family)

In 2021, after years of societal neglect and denial around the issue, the number of overdose-related deaths in the U.S. reached more than 100,000, the largest it had ever been. One of those people was my father.

In December of that year, his life was finally taken from him by a lethal cocktail of heroin and fentanyl after a lifelong dependency. This is a story that many Americans, especially those in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington where he lived and I grew up, know well.