WINCHESTER, Ky. — VOCAL-KY is organizing town halls in rural communities across the state to educate people on drug policies and harm reduction to combat the opioid crisis.
Dell Hager struggled with addiction for 17 years and has been in recovery for more than three. He is now a community outreach coordinator for New Day Recovery Center.
“We work with local health departments and Kentucky Harm Reduction Coalition by getting harm reduction resources and tools,” Hager said.
Harm reduction includes providing people with naloxone, fentanyl test strips and clean syringes to prevent overdose and the spread of disease.
Hager and the New Day Recovery Center team make kits with Narcan, test strips and hygiene products to hand out.
“What we’ve been seeing is that the rural area is needing a lot of harm reduction resources,” Hager said.
Hager’s team works with local health departments and law enforcement to find people in these rural communities who need the harm reduction kits.
“We go there, we stick to the point of harm reduction,” Hager said. “We go there with the intent of meeting somebody where they’re at, not where we want them to be.”
The New Day Recovery Center will be the site of VOCAL-KY’s third “No More Drug War Kentucky Coalition Townhall.”
“We have a 120-county focus,” said Stephanie Johnson, the statewide organizer for VOCAL-KY. “We have to do the same work throughout the whole entire state. We can’t just do it in the bigger cities. You can imagine what’s going on here. It’s worse in smaller towns.”
In 2022, Pike County had a fatal overdose rate that was almost double the state’s, according to University of Kentucky research.
The goal of the town halls is to educate community members and partners in rural areas about current drug policies and harm reduction.
“We need to do the same thing all throughout the state of Kentucky that we’re doing here in Louisville and then that way when we can start showing that these services and these practices work, we can get some better policy and people can stop dying,” Johnson said.
Keeping people alive is what matters to advocates like Hager.
“We want to give them the tools and the resources they need so they might be able to survive that night in case they want to make a decision later on to get help,” Hager said.
That help may include going into recovery at some point.
Townhalls in Hopkinsville and Pikeville have already taken place. The next one in Winchester will take place on Sep. 24 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.
For more information about the upcoming town hall, Johnson can be reached at stephanie@vocal-ky.org.
