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A couple from Ohio pushed a shopping cart filled with their tattered belongings toward West 34th Street as tourists crowded beside them. An older man from Massachusetts nodded off outside Pennsylvania Station, which 600,000 people pass through daily. Nearby, a woman from North Carolina crouched next to a cardboard sign.

New York’s transit hubs welcome millions of tourists and commuters every year. But in recent years, the hubs have also increasingly become a destination for people with opioid and other drug addictions, many of whom arrive from parts of the country that have seen soaring rates of drug use and fatal overdoses.

New York has its own drug crisis: Overdose deaths rose sharply in 2016 with the arrival of fentanyl, and the authorities say the city has become a center for the illegal synthetic opioid. But other than in pockets of the Bronx and Staten Island, the opioid crisis tends to be largely hidden from public view.

That is not so at Penn Station and the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown Manhattan, Jamaica Station in Queens and other transit centers. There, people in the throes of addiction line sidewalks, waiting to score, asking for money and even sleeping in makeshift camps. Their numbers swell as the weather grows warmer, their presence recalling a grittier era in New York.