The Big Apple’s spiraling drug crisis has reached a new low, with depravity across the city so commonplace, a glass-eyed junkie can stand in the middle of a Midtown sidewalk on a weekday morning for five long minutes — with a needle jutting out of his scab-covered arm.
The horrific example played out Wednesday around 11 a.m. on West 37th Street, where the man stood motionless with a needle jabbed into his vein, as passersby so numb to it all blithely maneuvered around him.
“That’s what I used to see when I was a kid, people all overdosed in the middle of the street — and dead,” Angel Figueroa, 55, who works in Midtown and grew up surrounded by the ills of addiction in the Lower East Side, told The Post.
“This world went backward, not forward.”
Even junkies such as Abraham Hwang, 32, can clearly see how grim the drug crisis has become in New York City, which he said is “at the climax” of the epidemic.
“I thought Long Island was bad,” said Hwang — who recently moved to the Big Apple with the hope of getting clean.
“My addiction definitely got worse here,” he said, plunging a needle into his neck to get his fix in front of a vacant storefront in the middle of West 36th Street.
On Wednesday, junkies later were spotted across the street from where the man with the needle in his arm stood, in front of a health center run by the nonprofit Housing Works, which provides clean syringes to addicts as part of its controversial “harm reduction” services.
Pamela Flamini, a 45-year-old cashier at the Italian restaurant Non Solo Piada, located across the street from the Housing Works center, ripped the nonprofit and the city’s open, growing embrace of harm reduction policies and services as the reason why her workplace is burglarized multiple times a week.
Helayne Seidman
“All drug addicts, they come here, [make a] long line in the morning,” Flamini said, adding that drug dealers also lurk in the area like vultures, and have threatened her.
“The people afterward [are] like a zombie. They come and steal things.”
Housing Works has raked in at least $80 million in taxpayer funding since 2018 for its housing programs and services, including substance abuse treatment. The group refused to comment.
The sight of junkies with used syringes at their feet and arms covered in blood has been a regular sighting for bespoke embroidery designer Ryan Abrams, 39, who works just a few dozen feet down from where the needle man stood.
Helayne Seidman
“I see someone shoot up here every day,” Abrams said.
“I started bringing a Taser to work because people were throwing garbage cans and lunging at you with bloody arms.”
Tourists en route to Macy’s or Broadway matinees are shocked by the Big Apple’s theater of the absurd.
“On Madison Avenue, they were injecting themselves…the blokes were out in the open. They’re not bothered,” sighed Charlie Callow, 59, who was visiting with his wife and their two kids from Northampton, England.
“The last time I came [to the city] was a long time ago but it’s changed a hell of a lot.”
Workers, meanwhile, are terrified to come into the office these days, fearful of being randomly attacked by addicts getting high outside their buildings.
“These people, they can go crazy, they can stick you with the dirty needles for nothing,” said maintenance worker Andro Macapinlac, 46, standing not five feet away from a group of junkies sucking on crack pipes out along his office building on West 36th Street.
“You don’t want to come to work like this, risking your life,” he added.