The first warning came within minutes. Walking onto Atkinson Street with a camera visible, a man at a makeshift desk yelled for me to come over. He slammed down what looked like a screwdriver. His jaw was sunken — the hollowed look of long-term meth use. He stared. I stared back.
Someone behind me shouted to get out of there. I turned and walked toward the perimeter. The man I'd been talking to on the edge said it plainly: you were going to get jumped. That was going to happen. Maybe bring a smaller camera next time.
Mass & Cass sits within blocks of some of the best medical centers in the world. Boston University Medical Center rises behind the tents. The skyline is visible from the street. But on Atkinson Street — Boston's skid row — the distance between those institutions and the people living here might as well be measured in years.
The streets are an open-air market for fentanyl, heroin, and crystal meth. Drug dealers make morning rounds the way vendors make deliveries. They call it snacks. "It's going to be a long day — get your snacks now." It is easier to find drugs on Mass & Cass than it is to find a bathroom.
The smell of homelessness sticks to your clothing. Smoke from crystal meth drifts through the air between the tents. From above, the encampment looks organized — rows of colorful tarps and shelters pressed against the buildings. At street level, the order dissolves. People sit, sleep, and use in the open.
What strikes you is how fast they switch. Up, then down. Crack to meth to heroin to fentanyl — cycling through whatever is available, whatever takes the edge off the last hit or fills the gap until the next one. They poke and poke and poke. Some of them have nothing left — veins collapsed, arms scarred, searching for anywhere on the body that still takes a needle.
The smell stays with you long after you leave. It settles into your clothing, your hair. Hours later, it's still there — burnt chemicals, exhaust, decay. It's not something you notice and move past. It's part of the air itself, part of what everyone here breathes every day.
Patrol officers move through but the presence feels procedural — a perimeter drawn around a problem that no one has solved. City officials remain at an impasse. Few are willing to treat this as what it is: a humanitarian crisis that can only be understood at the individual level.
The people living here are not an abstraction. They have names.
She has lived on Mass & Cass for over five years. She lost a public housing voucher and moved in with a friend to get back on her feet. When she couldn't pay for five hundred dollars in drugs, four men held her down and raped her. Tanya contracted HIV through her addiction to crack, crystal meth, and heroin. She has tried to get clean several times, but rehab never fully addressed her struggle, and each time she was put back on the street.
She feels safer out here — protected by a small group of friends — than in the shelters, where she has been sexually assaulted more than once.
She moved from Georgia to Mass & Cass over five years ago. She has struggled with depression and addiction since she was fourteen. She is the mother of two children — one conceived through rape — and is no longer able to see either of them.
The scars on her body tell a history the words barely reach: she was jumped in the staircase of a parking garage and set on fire. Unlike some on the Mile, she still holds a Section 8 voucher, but finding permanent placement while battling addictions to crystal meth and heroin has proved impossible.
Women on the Mile are especially vulnerable — watched, studied, passed by. Some describe it as living in a zoo.
Make no mistake — Methadone Mile is an extremely dangerous place. Testimonies of thefts, stabbings, murders, sexual assaults, and human trafficking are constant. Many of the people here feel dehumanized. Some describe it as living in a Black Mirror experiment they can't turn off.
A man from Ohio explained how he couldn't leave Boston because his identification had been stolen. His social security number was gone. Every time he saved enough for a bus ticket home, he was robbed. "That's how they get you. They steal from you when you sleep. In the shelters, if your shoes aren't tied to your body, they'll take them. And even then, maybe they'll cut them off your feet."
Without money, a mailing address for basic paperwork, and the willpower to simply walk away, you are stuck — trapped in a cycle of half-hearted government empathy and deepening addiction.
Amongst the crisis, small acts of kindness persist — food handed out from the back of a car in a gas station parking lot.
Shared misery on Methadone Mile runs as deep as the addiction itself. Drugs are plentiful. Hope is all but gone.
Alexander Carrigg is an American photographer and freelance journalist documenting issues of historical significance including political unrest, conflict, and humanitarian crisis. AlexanderCarrigg.com