Kensington Beach

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

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 health crises, and the gruesome reality of a drug that eats you alive.

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.

This is not a story for the faint of heart. It is a scream for help from a place where so many have fallen silent. It is a raw, intimate look at the bonds of love and survival, and a testament to the brutal, beautiful, and often contradictory nature of hitting rock bottom. Ultimately, Kensington Beach is the story of 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.