James Lileks has stated the obvious in these pages, and the obvious is worth stating again: the city of Minneapolis has permitted an open-air drug market, and the mayor, Jacob Frey, has now moved to disperse it. The Lileks column (Let’s Treat Criminals Like (Dare I Say It?) Criminals, National Review, 12 July 2026) defends an order older than the republic. The magistrate is God’s servant for the good of those under him, and bears the sword not in vain (Romans 13:4, ESV). The household, the neighborhood, the playground are sacred trusts, and the governing authority exists to keep them so. For years the city declined to govern. The open-air drug market is not a spontaneous growth; it is the fruit of an order that refused its work. Frey has now turned, and the turning is just. The Lileks column names, with appropriate scorn, the council members who would prefer that the needle remain in the playground rather than the criminal record attach to the needle-strewer. They speak of criminalizing homelessness, of following the undocumented into deportation, of the cruelty of enforcing the law. They do not speak of the four children.
Four children, in the Little Earth housing project, stepped on discarded needles in the month before the mayor’s announcement. They required HIV post-exposure prophylaxis. The treatment is a twenty-eight-day course of antiretroviral medication, begun within hours of exposure, taken twice daily, with side effects that include nausea, diarrhea, fatigue, and headache. The children were tested for HIV at the time of the stick, and again at six weeks, at three months, and at six months. They were tested for hepatitis B and hepatitis C. The anxiety of those intervals is not abstract; it is the particular anxiety of a child who has been told that a discarded syringe has entered his foot, and that the drug now in his body is the only thing standing between him and a disease that, untreated, becomes a life sentence. The needles were discarded in the open-air drug market that the city, until Frey’s announcement, declined to disperse. The market has done its work: the syringe lies where the child steps, the child steps where the child plays, the playground is a needle field. The children were playing. The playground is the place set apart for the child; the order of the household, of the neighborhood, of the city, exists to keep it so. Four children carry the record of the disorder in their bloodstreams and in the twenty-eight days of pills they swallowed, and in the six months of testing that follow.
The open-air drug market has pronounced its own sentence. The man who discards the needle in the playground stands where the order places him. His disorder is the visible record of his standing. The council member who speaks of criminalizing homelessness would have the city treat the orderly and the disorderly as one people. They are not one people. The order of the household, of the neighborhood, of the magistrate, exists to mark the difference. The four children who required HIV post-exposure prophylaxis are the testimony the disorder has left. The magistrate bears the sword. The sword is the instrument by which the order discloses who belongs where. The needle-strewer belongs outside. The playground belongs to the child. This is the arrangement, restored. The standing of the one is disclosed by the needle; the standing of the other is disclosed by the twenty-eight days of pills. The order sorts them, and the sorting is just. The open-air market will be dispersed. The children will return to the playground. The arrangement was always there. The city merely remembered.