An event next week will gather together those on the frontlines of the opioid battle.

But the experts are not the only ones directing the conversation.

At the first ever Kentucky Opioid Symposium.

Brian Hubbard with the Kentucky Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission, the group that organized the event, said they traveled the state for more than a year talking to people who are dealing with this crisis.

And that feedback helped the symposium take shape.

This symposium is a gathering of everybody across the Commonwealth of Kentucky who wishes to engage in the fight against the ongoing opioid epidemic, an epidemic that has been playing out in the state since 1996.

The symposium is going to be aimed at treatment providers, people who are in recovery, the family members of people who are in recovery, the family members of folks who are trying to attain recovery, and anybody else who wants to be able to engage in the fight against the epidemic.

We are going to be talking about not just how it began, but where we're at now and what we've got to do to create generational change over the next decade plus in order to whip this thing, in order to combat the opioid epidemic.

What the commission has learned and what many have known for some time is that you have got to have a full frontal assault against all of its dynamics.

That means that you have to prevent its occurrence beginning with youth, that you have to treat the problem once it takes hold of an individual, and then it's that individual comes out from the cloud of active use.

You have to be able to support them over the course of a long term recovery process that will take them through a battle that they will engage for the rest of their lives by virtue of the way in which opioid dependance impacts the biology of the body.

We've got to be able to prevent it.

We've got to treat it.

And then when individuals who have been affected by it start getting on their feet, we've got to help them in any way that we can reclaim ownership of their lives.

We have a generational garden growing right in front of us that we have got to teach.

And if we're going to prevent the next 26 years from being as deadly as the prior 26, this has to be a priority and it's got to be a matter of focus in a way that it has not here to 4 million.

Likewise, with the advent of Senate Bill 90, which is a criminal justice reform project that is aimed at place and people in treatment before they face incarceration.

The creation of the Recovery Ready Communities Task Force and the Priorities that they have set for us, for the individual counties and cities that have their own pot of money to work with, and the Commission's focus on providing individuals in recovery with the resources that they need to rebuild their lives, whether that is housing, access to transportation, vocational training and meaningful educational opportunity that will credential them to be able to work in a way that will make them self-sufficient.

Both of those sets of priorities have got to receive sustained, long term attention, and those priorities have been formed in direct response to the feedback received over 11 town halls from Pikeville to Paducah, where those needs were articulated.

In every locality, as devastating as the opioid epidemic has been, there is a tremendous amount of light in this state that is being eliminated from a beautiful grassroots immune system that has responded with all the very best virtues that make Kentucky such an exceptional place.

And we look forward to be unable to highlight that reality in a hopeful and celebratory way.