Morning Wire - Recovering Opioid Addicts Fuel Kentucky’s Rebirth | Saturday Extra

Episode Date: February 24, 2024

Small towns in Kentucky were devastated by the opioid epidemic. Now several recovering addicts are returning home, starting businesses and driving the economic renaissance of the Bluegrass State. Writer Sam Quinones details Kentucky’s organic recovery story. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Recovering addicts provide kind of a raw material, a natural resource. These are people who have lived through it, are grateful to still be alive, are very, very energized, very optimistic, very creative. Kentucky was one of the first states to be devastated by the opioid crisis, but there are signs that bluegrass state is beginning its comeback. In this episode, we speak to an investigative journalist about the quiet revitalization taking root in eastern Kentucky and what small towns can do to spur. homegrown investment. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley. It's Saturday,

February 24th, and this is Morning Wire. Joining us to discuss the Quiet Revolution emerging in Kentucky is journalist and author Sam Cignonas. Sam, thanks so much for coming on. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Now, before we jump into what's happening in Kentucky, can you talk a little bit about how you got into covering the opioid crisis? Yes, I've been a reporter 37-year. At one point, I lived in Mexico for 10 years. I was a freelance writer down there, wrote two books about the country. I came back to the United States and found a job with the LA Times. I'm from Los Angeles, so it was kind of my hometown paper.

While there, this was 2005, six, seven, right in there. The drug wars between the drug cartels in Mexico erupted. And I was very shocked to see that. lived 10 years in Mexico, never saw anything like what began to happen down there. I was put on a team of reporters at the LA Times to cover what was going on in Mexico. And my job, actually, because I spoke Spanish and was living in L.A., was to cover how the drugs that crossed over from Mexico into the United States, how they made it to the rest of the country. As I was doing that, I began to understand that law enforcement was seizing record amounts of heroin.

I could not understand why there would be more heroin coming into the country. But as part of that, I began to write about this one town in a small state in Mexico called Nayarit, where everybody from the town came north to sell heroin retail, like pizza, very much like a pizza delivery system just for heroin, retail amounts of heroin, small amounts. As I was doing that, I began to really get into that story. And I began to realize that the reason that they had, a growing market now suddenly for heroin, it was because of a much, much larger story,

which was the story of the opioid revolution in American medicine, which held that we should be making very aggressive use of prescription opioids like Vicodin, a percocet, and oxycontin as a way of controlling and eradicating pain in America. And that this created, as it unfolded, This created a lot of opioid addicts and that some subset of those addicts was switching to heroin, provided now by Mexican traffickers, including the guys that I was writing about. So I realized I was focusing on really the small story, the much larger story, was the opioid problem that was unfolding them and was nationwide by that time. I wrote a book about that called Dreamland, that whole saga.

then as I was going around the country speaking about that, I began to realize that the story itself was now changing and that the doctors had really cut back on prescribing those pills. But in their place, the Mexican trafficking world had been supplying enormous quantities, growing, and very large quantities of synthetic, illegal synthetic drugs, fentanyl and methamphetamine. Well, now you've written this newer book called The Least of Us,

And it sounds like a little bit more of a hopeful story. Are we turning a corner in the drug crisis, or is it too premature to say that? I would say that there are very ominous signs and very, very hopeful signs at the same time. Certainly the supply of fentanyl and of methamphetamine, both of which are synthetic drugs made only with chemicals, no plants involved, those supplies are just stanchol. those supplies are just staggering, and they're nationwide, and they're transforming drug addiction, drug treatment. Never have we seen this before. You find fentanyl and methamphetamine in New England and in L.A. and Oklahoma and every place in between.

However, at the same time, I believe that there is many stories of hope out there that I think are really important to point out. And one thing that I wrote about in The Least of Us, in fact, was a major theme. of the least of us was that the way out of this, one way out of this seems to me to focus very much not on big magic silver bullet answers to all our problems, but on small, unnoticed, daily work, daily showing up. And I think this is happening around the country. I recently wrote a story for the free press about towns in eastern Kentucky, which was a center of the opioid epidemic when it first began, and now returning, now coming back, rebounding, largely due to the efforts of people

who are in recovery from drug addiction, but also hopeful, I think, because the story of these towns is about the smallest little pieces of, you know, efforts bearing fruit. People starting very, very small, micro-entrepreneurs, really, small little businesses, not waiting for a Walmart or a shopping center or a big box store or a factory to save the town. But lots of small little businesses starting up, being supported by local people and not really by anything from the outside. It's a very bootstrap kind of story that I really loved. And I think that this is happening more than we know because these stories are not easy to find and you do have to search them out. But they are absolutely there. Now, you've written about some of these micro entrepreneurs, and you've said

some of them are people who are coming out of recovery themselves. Who are some of the examples that come to mind? Sure. One that first got me into this was a woman by the name of Mandy Fugate Shephel in the town of Hazard, Kentucky, town about 5,000 people. I had known hazard from other people during my work on the addiction epidemic, and people tell me about hazard, wow, it's just devastated. I saw many people there strung out. So when I went out there to speak last spring, that's what I was expecting to see. And in actual fact, what I saw was a lot of recovery. And one of the main things that struck me was that Mandy had started a bookstore. And I'm not sure when there's ever been a bookstore, East Lexington, Kentucky, in the state of Kentucky. But there now is one.

And she started this thing. And no certainty she started and COVID hit. And then a few months later, a big, a flood just ravaged the whole area. She got two feet of water in her store and all this. Yet she made it through largely because people in the tent were just intent on saving the store, keeping the store going, people who were from Hazard lived in other parts of the country, would order books. But she was part of a gradual emergence of small entrepreneurial businesses that had been going on for maybe a year or so by then, maybe even longer, in fact.

And so she was taking encouragement from others who had already gone before, and then others followed her. And so from this, that's kind of the point of the story, that small businesses, you have a lot of people out there with these great small business ideas. What's held them back up to now is the idea that I don't know if I can take that risk because no one's done it before. They see people doing it, and then they do it. And now what you have in Hazard is 43 businesses have, have. start in last, I think it's four years or so. And they're all small businesses. They've hired like 170 people, which is probably the amount of jobs that you expect kind of from a big factory. And so you have this like rebirth and it's really on the smallest scale. Man to yourselves

in recovery from opioid pain pill addiction. Many others are as well. Stephanie Callahan, who runs the hot mess express women's boutique. Also in downtown is also in recovery. Many of them employees in this kind of commercial resurgence that you're seeing in hazard or in recovery as well. And so you're seeing this emerge and you're seeing not just in hazard, but in many other little towns in and around eastern Kentucky. And I just find this to be an extraordinarily exhilarating, you know, a story. Of course, as I say, it's hard to see it. You need to dig in and find it because I think this is happening out there in far more numerous ways that we just don't see very clearly. Well, Kentucky has also been awarded about 900 million in settlement funds from

some of these companies that pushed the pills on the residents. Is that funding contributing to this trend at all? No, no, that's not really part of the picture. That money's just been coming out in the last year or so, I think. I don't know the story in Kentucky, but these are not businesses that were started with that money. There may be some municipal improvements, infrastructure improvements that come with that but no this is really just a kind of an organic thing that began to happen because you find a good number of people in recovery you find some people were moving back to the town because you know during covid or prior to covid it was very expensive in some towns that they were living in and so now they find a small town life preferable you begin to see a renovation too i think it's very important

of municipal government that was and has been dominated perhaps in some of these towns by kind of old guard that lasted in it for 30, 40 years and probably needed to be refreshed and have new ideas or new approaches to municipal government, new ideas of understanding the role of, say, a mayor and hazard they hired a downtown coordinator for the very first time in the history of town, Bailey Richards, who now helps guide investment to the downtown and also helps small businesses survive because small businesses form very easily. They also go out of business very easily. And that's not really been the case. A lot of them have stuck in this town and other towns I visited as well.

And so to me, this feels far more organic and coming from the effort and the energies. And then, of course, the energies that then grow from people watching other people do it and say, oh, I could do that too. Oh, well, let's do it. That is a kind of an exciting thing to watch. And one reason that I wanted to write about this. It is. That's the best story about this I've heard in a long time.

Now, what are some lessons that other small towns can take from this? What are some things that say small town governments could do if they wanted to start revitalizing their town? I think one of the things that these towns need to focus on, and they realize this very early on, is that deindustrialization, or really in these cases, the departure of coal mines, departure of a lot of people have left the downtown's very abandoned. And there's a lot of old run-down buildings that haven't had any tender loving care for quite some time. And they act as a blight. In fact, some of these buildings are gorgeous, you know, brick buildings. Once you begin to get money invested in refurbishing them, all of a sudden they become jewels. You're thrilled that you didn't knock them down.

But you got to get to that point. And sometimes what I think this requires, this is where new municipal leadership can really help. and that is figuring out ways of using tax incentives that very often have been in the tax code for a long time, but city government just didn't think it was worth using or they didn't want to use it in downtown because they wanted to put all their money into a big shopping center out by the interstate or something like that. I think that there are a lot of ways to use tax law that way. And I think that in hazard and some of the other towns I've visited, that they're figuring this out. It's a very simple stuff.

like it's elaborate, ornate stuff. Frequently, it's just tax moratorium. So you pay the amount of tax that you're paying now, and then you put all this investment and refurbish the buildings, but you still keep paying that lower tax on buildings where they were really in need of work. You keep paying that lower tax for five years or something like that. It's a way of giving incentives to people to invest again in those properties. And I think what's happening now is that people don't need that incentive as much

because they can see a lot of places downtown are coming back and they want to be part of that. Well, Sam, thank you so much for coming on. I've done a few interviews on this topic with various authors and whatnot. And this is the most hopeful interview we've had. So I really appreciate it. Well, thank you very much for your interest in my work. I really appreciate that. That was journalist and author Sam Cignonas. And this has been an extra edition of Morning Wire.