NY Times Magazine: “In eastern Kentucky, a region plagued by poverty and at the heart of the country’s opioid epidemic, the burden of addressing this treatment gap has mainly been taken up by addiction-rehab companies. Many stand more like community centers or churches than medical clinics, offering not just chemical but also spiritual and logistical services with the aim of helping people in addiction find employment and re-enter society. And in the two five-year periods between 2008 and 2017, eight of the 10 counties in America with the steepest decline in overdose mortality rates were in eastern Kentucky. The state now has more residential treatment beds per person than any other state in the country, and provisional data show that, in the 12 months ending on June 30 this year, the number of overdose deaths dropped by 20 percent over the previous 12-month period. Eastern Kentucky is one of the places where you’re most likely to die of a drug addiction but also the place where you’re most likely to receive treatment for it.
Among the rehab companies around, none have taken this holistic recovery philosophy further than Addiction Recovery Care. ARC, whose motto is “Crisis to Career,” has treated tens of thousands of people in addiction since its founding in 2008. In the 2010s, as the power utility moved away from coal energy, the area lost hundreds of mining jobs, and ARC began buying up abandoned buildings and turning them into businesses staffed by clients in recovery. There is an event-planning brick-and-mortar, a cafe, a bakery, a small gallery, an old theater that the company renovated, a pharmacy, a welding company, an accredited Christian college, a private Christian school, a landscaping company and an auto-body shop. All are owned and run by ARC and its chief executive, Tim Robinson.”