Welcome to the new New York. 

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 see as 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.

“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.

“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.

“We’ve got family, children.”

Further down in Greenwich Village, a onetime bastion of liberalism, small groups of strung-out addicts were spotted that same day on leaf-lined streets and in the shadows of Washington Square Park’s notorious northwest corner, sucking on glass pipes as if the 1980s were back in full swing.

“What’s happening with all these laced drugs, you don’t know what’s in them…it’s making everyone a little intense, skittish, anxious, and psychotic,” said one longtime Village neighbor.

In November 2021, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio heralded the opening of the nation’s first two supervised injection sites, which he and other progressive pols promised would help address the surge in fatal overdoses across the city.

Mayor Eric Adams has continued to push the controversial approach to battling addiction — promising to open three more safe injection sites by 2025 while unveiling vending machines that dispense overdose-reversing naloxone, drug-testing strips and free crack pipes. 

And NYPD told cops to give junkies the go-ahead to shoot up after Albany decriminalized the possession and sale of needles. 

“The city doesn’t know how to handle [the drug epidemic] and is making some deliberate choices in dedicating resources,” Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the conservative think tank Manhattan Institute for Public Policy, said, noting the lack of quality-of-life enforcement by police.

“The thing about harm reduction is it’s a band aid,” he added.

“[The city is saying], ‘We can’t do anything to address people’s substance use disorders, we can’t address community harm, so we’re going to hand out needles and fentanyl strips and hope for the best.’”

The drug crisis, meanwhile, has only worsened.

Overdose deaths in New York City soared by at least 85 percent since March 2019, with 2,865 people dying from drug overdoses in the year ending March 2023, according to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Since Nov. 2021, when the city opened its safe injection sites, overdose deaths have ticked up 5%, from 2,731. 

Cops “lost their lives” and “put themselves at considerable risk to clean this city up,” said retired sergeant Pete Panuccio, 63, who worked in the NYPD’s special anti-crack unit in the 1980s.

“Now it’s a festering dump. People are using drugs everywhere…and nobody cares.”

Patrick Gallahue, a city Health Department spokesman, continued to defend the needle exchange programs, noting they have drastically reduced new HIV cases among drug users. Citywide, cases of HIV have been steadily declining since 2001, per Health Department data.

The health department is making naloxone, treatment, and other support easily accessible to community members as fentanyl deaths reach “crisis levels” in the city, he added.

“We care about New Yorkers, and we have an obligation to save lives,” he said.

City Councilwoman Diana Ayala (D-Manhattan/Bronx), who heads the General Welfare Committee, said she understood why concerned residents are focusing on public drug use — but believes a root problem that needs to be addressed is the drug dealers.

“[Residents] want to get rid of [the] problem, which they see as the person with the needle in their arm, but the real problem is the person that’s bringing that drugs to them,” Ayala said.

Jerry Scupp, vice president of the Garment District Alliance, noted that since their area is a magnet for addicts, legislators, and city leaders could tackle the scourge of public drug use by introducing stronger penalties for drug dealing and related offenses.

“[These nonprofits] are not servicing the local population — it’s bringing in [a] lot of people who are vulnerable into this neighborhood, and we feel they’re being preyed upon by the drug dealers,” Scupp said.

“We feel like there should be some more substantial consequences for people who sold drugs in these area.”