Boston Beacon Hill locals say drug crisis has gotten ‘very scary’

Residents in a ritzy Boston, Massachusetts, neighborhood are complaining that city leadership isn’t doing enough to control open drug use, with locals saying the situation has gotten “very scary.”

During a Boston City Council meeting in October 2024, Beacon Hill resident Katherine Kennedy said she hasn’t seen this level of illegal drug use in Beacon Hill, according to Boston 25. According to Realtor.com, the average home price in Beacon Hill is $2.3 million.

“Prior to this year, I’ve never seen the Boston Common, Cambridge Street or the Esplanade get this overrun with drug paraphernalia or folks in crisis,” Kennedy said. 

Kennedy added, “As a mother of two small children, this is very scary.”

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The mother of two now carries a sharps container, meant for needles, in her diaper bag.

A 2024 report compiled by the Boston Public Health Commission reported that there was a 47.1% increase in drug usage mortality rates between 2020-2022 compared to 2017-2019 in the Beacon Hill, Back Bay, North end and West End communities, which are near each other. Similarly, data compiled by the Boston Police Department indicates that there was an 8% increase in overall theft incidents in 2025 compared to the five-year average in the area, including Beacon Hill. 

In 2022, Democratic Boston Mayor Michelle Wu helped launch a needle exchange program, including the distribution of free pipes that can be used to smoke crack or methamphetamine in a “harm reduction” strategy.

“Every step that we take has to also be about immediately saving lives,” Wu said at the time. “We have seen a big drop and data proven success with the parts of this program, the goals of this program, which are to ensure there is a stop to communicable diseases that are preventable.” 

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For Kennedy, who’s a resident of Beacon Hill, the program has led to a dramatic increase in needles seen on her kids’ walk to school. 

“I pass discarded needles as I walk my 5-year-old to her public school every day,” Kennedy said, according to the Boston Herald. “Having to keep needles away from my kids as I walk them to preschool is unacceptable.”

“Boston and the surrounding region is not doing enough to actually disrupt the cycle of addiction that has led to this crisis,” she added.

Robert Charles, former assistant secretary at the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, who’s running for governor in Maine, told Fox News Digital that Americans don’t fully understand the downstream impact of illegal drugs.

“It’s a sequence of events. You get dramatic increases in the drug presence, which is a testing of law enforcement and political leadership. If the political leadership and law enforcement either don’t have the resources or don’t have the political will, you gradually see an increase in the drug trafficking itself and, of course, in overdoses,” Charles said. “The burglaries go up, the robberies go up, the assaults go up. The domestic abuse goes up. Something like 80% of all domestic abuse is tied to polydrug use.”