Health leaders and elected officials in Kentucky are working to fight the opioid epidemic across the state.

U.S. Representative Hal Rogers has been a strong advocate for recovery and reform.

He spoke at the Opioid Symposium and referenced a newspaper article calling Eastern Kentucky the country's painkiller capital.

He said he wants it to be known as becoming the nation's recovery capital, and this event aims to do just that.

We spoke with experts who touted treatment options they said are pivotal for a person's recovery journey.

I think in the beginning there was more of a stigma because people were just not understanding of opiates and the epidemic.

But as we began to see that we weren't just going to come out of the epidemic and that we were having more and more overdoses, people began to understand that we needed to embrace more treatment options.

And through that, we have had to figure out like, what's going to work and what's not going to work.

And we started to become more educated and turned toward the evidence and realized that medication assisted treatment is the gold standard for treatment for opiate use disorder.

So for medication assisted treatment, we have different programs that people can use, and they would either use programs like methadone or Suboxone or Naltrexone for maintenance therapies, for medication assisted treatment, and that would treat their long term opiate use disorder.

I think we really need to look at this like a chronic disease model and look at this like patients who are on diabetes require insulin because we never say that someone who is on insulin needs to get off of that and start learning to manage their lifestyle better and start yelling at them for testing dirty for having sugar in their urine.

Right.

And we don't yell at them for what they're doing with their lifestyle.

But we turn that around and we do the same thing.

And for patients that have opiate use disorders, and it's really not fair because their brain chemistry is different and they require different medications in order to stabilize their brain chemistry.

What I like to say that Life Learning Center does is we build recovery capital.

Individuals that are released from treatment and released from incarceration.

They have to figure out ways that they're going to sustain themselves.

And that involves getting a career or matriculating to post-secondary education.

We administer a battery of exams to look at interest as well as aptitude, and we embark upon career opportunities that are in those paradigms for which they had an interest.

Life learning centers put $4.8 million back into the workforce this year at $19 per hour.

These are much beyond living wage careers.

I think that we can do better and I think that we need to do better in Kentucky, because with the number of overdoses that we have, I mean, what we are doing isn't working.

So treating people with opiate use disorders differently or telling them that, you know, they just need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and do better or just say, no, that's never worked.

So why should we continue to do that?

I think we need to embrace our treatment options that we have.

Figure out what the research shows and go with it.