05.21.2025

Globe's intellectually dishonest piece on mayoral race mudslinging | Open air drug use, dealing explodes around Boston Medical Center | Spring real estate market in Greater Boston turns dismal as sales fall and prices near $1 million | The Healey-Driscoll administration’s ideologically-driven demolition of voke school admission standards | Quick hits |

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Overrun: Addicts shooting up on lawn of Boston’s public hospital as open-air drug use explodes around city’s notorious Mass. and Cass

The photo says it all.

Taken on Sunday, it shows one man injecting drugs into the neck of another individual on Boston Medical Center’s lawn.

Despite a steady barrage of complaints from neighbors, BMC has failed to take effective steps to prevent this pocket of neighborhood green space in the South End from becoming a playground for addicts, such as deploying hospital security near the entrance.

Instead, the hospital has relied on Boston police to play a thankless game of whack-a-mole, chasing troublemakers off the lawn only to see them return after officers leave, neighbors say.

Brazen drug use on BMC’s lawn/photo by John Stillwaggon

“The hospital was a really good neighbor until recently,” said John Stillwaggon, co-president of the Worcester Square Area Neighborhood Association, who took the photo.

“On the weekends, they camp out on the lawn and under the tables. When you walk by, you can’t help but notice what’s going on,” Stillwaggon told Contrarian Boston. “They are using the alleys as a bathroom.”

Yet South End residents say the photo and the brazen drug use it portrays are just the tip of a very troubled iceberg.

The Wu administration and city police in recent months have cracked down on street crime and drug use in downtown Boston in response to complaints from residents and businesses there.

But the ramped up enforcement downtown has simply pushed the druggies and their dealers back to the streets around BMC and the intersection of Mass. and Cass, which for years now has been synonymous with city’s flailing efforts to rein in open air drug use and dealing, neighborhood residents contend.

Contrarian Boston reached out to both the mayor’s press office and to Boston Medical Center, but did not receive a response.

photo by John Stillwaggon

Andy Brand, co-president of the Worcester Square Area Neighborhood Association and a long-time neighborhood resident who lives on Mass. Ave., told Contrarian Boston that he and other neighbors feel trapped in their own homes, with the drug crowd spilling into the neighborhood and camping out on front stoops.

Brand said his cat’s diabetes medication was stolen from his front stoop - package theft is a major issue - and that he couldn’t even take his garbage out to the curb one night.

“If there are one or two people on my stoop, I can ask them to leave,” Brand said. “If there is more than that, people have gotten hostile and we just call 911.”

The drug crowd has also taken over the neighborhood bus shelter, which is a draw since it is heated, with 20 or more people hanging around it at a time.

“People are talking about removing the bus shelter and removing the heater,” Brand said. “There are needles and feces all over the place.”

The problems at Mass. and Cass and the streets around Boston’s public hospital go back nearly a decade now, to the closure of the city’s main recovery complex on Long Island in Boston Harbor.

With the construction of a replacement bridge to the old Long Island recovery campus still years away at best, Stillwaggon and other neighborhood leaders would like to see the city explore interim options.

But the Wu administration hasn’t been keen on them, rejecting, for example, a proposal by the Suffolk County sheriff to build a treatment facility that could accommodate 100 people at a time.

Yet apparently it’s just fine that neighborhood residents feel like prisoners in their own homes, fearful of venturing out.

How is that ok?

Flawed narrative: Globe story on Boston mayoral race mud-slinging falls prey to bothsideism

We’ll grant that a lot of mud has been hurled in Boston’s mayoral race.

That much the Globe gets right in this piece, “‘Marie Antoinette,’ ‘private jet’: Michelle Wu, Josh Kraft trade barbs as Boston mayor’s race gets off to a fiery start.”

But the story’s portrayal of two candidates trading barbed personal insults at every turn? We must not be watching the same race.

There have been personal insults aplenty since the race kicked off in earnest, barely three months ago.

But it’s been a fairly one-sided affair, with Boston Mayor Michelle Wu dumping on challenger Josh Kraft early and often.