Author: People Advocating Recovery

In The Plague Albert Camus was less prescient about plagues to come, or even descriptive of a certain plague among the many that had visited Oran over the centuries, than using that metaphor to describe “plague” inherent in the human reality. Today our reference defines plague as a highly contagious bacterial disease that comes in many forms and spreads globally as our world is interconnected. We want to highlight a plague that kills over 600,000 Americans every year, year in and year out.

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I was asked to write a “blog” and I have never written a blog. I have no idea what I am doing but Mike suggested to use what I had already on social media. I wrote a great “blog” this morning when my brain was on fire from my morning run and then it drifted as I drove to work by “a forgotten dentist appointment, phone calls, etc.” Now you get the best of what is left from my mental mess.

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I had a conversation this last week in relationship to thoughts, emotions and behavior and what my choices are today. If I have a knife… am I going to peel an apple or harm someone… when I get behind the wheel of a car… am I choosing to drive in harmony or am I using that car as a weapon…. and there’s many more….

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I have been a “blogger” for Faces and Voices of Recovery and my community press for several years. I shared a bunch of words gathered from lived experience. I wrote and spoke my words and many times, the words of others about experiencing and finding joy in the reality of active and sustainable recovery. That description has more life than long-term recovery. Glad to join PAR blogs. I appreciated The Recovery Movement: Claiming Our Space and Our Story by Jeremy Byard, LRCC.

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At a moment when many people are finding it difficult to see eye-to-eye with their fellow Kentuckians, there’s one thing we all can agree on: We must keep fighting to end addiction in the commonwealth.

This is a public health crisis that has only worsened due to the challenges of the last eight months, with substance use and overdose deaths trending in the wrong direction.

However, there is good news. Even amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Kentucky public officials remain committed to breaking the vicious cycle of addiction. In November, the state will submit a transformative proposal to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that, if approved, will expand access to substance use disorder treatment among some of our society’s most vulnerable and at-risk individuals: those in our criminal justice system.

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When grave new challenges emerge, it would be nice if existing ones would subside. Sadly, that is just not how the world works.

In communities across the Commonwealth and throughout the U.S., mental health and addiction treatment providers are facing a new set of challenges as they continue to care for some of our population’s most vulnerable amid a global pandemic.

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, 67,367 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2018 — more than 1,300 of whom were here in Kentucky. While public health officials and providers battle one crisis, we cannot afford to overlook another that has been impacting our communities for years — and one that will most certainly still be here even after the COVID-19 outbreak subsides.

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