EAST BOSTON — East Boston woke up this week to a nightmare in broad daylight: a hulking vending machine bolted to the sidewalk outside a neighborhood health center, glowing with bright buttons and stocked not with snacks or soda — but with Narcan sprays, hypodermic needles, fentanyl test strips, and overdose kits. All of it free. All of it paid for by taxpayers.

The machine is open day and night, needing nothing more than a ZIP code. Press a button, and out slide the tools of addiction. In a neighborhood where addicts already slump in courtyards and lean against doorways, residents fear the dispenser will turn Eastie into a 24-hour supply hub for Boston’s drug crisis.

One longtime local, glaring at the machine’s screen, told Mass Daily News: “It feels like they just dropped a junkie’s candy shop right in the middle of the neighborhood.”

Parents are furious. They say nothing stops a child from punching in a ZIP code and walking away with Narcan sprays or a syringe kit. The fear isn’t abstract. South Boston still remembers the horror when a four-year-old boy stepped on a discarded needle at a park and had to be rushed to the hospital, put on an HIV prevention cocktail as doctors prayed he’d be spared lasting damage. For Eastie families, that nightmare now looms closer than ever.

City officials call it “harm reduction.” Critics call it surrender. The shelves are lined with Narcan to jolt overdosed bodies back to life, fentanyl strips to test poisoned street drugs, and syringe packs wrapped neat and sterile, shimmering under the fluorescent glow. To neighbors, it looks more like City Hall building a taxpayer-funded drug bazaar than solving a crisis.

And while officials boast of compassion, the so-called humanitarian side of the machine is hard to find. Buried among the shelves, far below the syringes and sprays, are items like socks, gloves, and blankets — the only reminder that the vending machine was billed as a humanitarian effort.