Secretary of State Michael Adams was in Washington, D.C. today taking part in a panel on human trafficking.

Adams was there to talk about Kentucky businesses against Trafficking, a program launched earlier this year by his office to combat human trafficking with the help of businesses around the state.

During the panel discussion, Adams talked about growing the program and making people aware that human trafficking happens everywhere.

I guess one metric is how many partners we have, and we do have going on a thousand partners.

But, the key again is who are the partners?

And so if every business in Kentucky can be a part of that would be great.

But if it's a, you know, home based business that sells arts and crafts online, love to have them in the program, but that's not really what we're after is the number of businesses.

What we're after is the type of businesses.

And so especially to have the convenience stores working with us of the Hotel Motel Association, working with this are our chambers at the, at the, state and local level, working with this, that gives us real penetration in the communities that you can't just get with an arbitrary number of businesses.

So we've been very strategic about what that growth looks like.

So I think it was important to have our kickoff, a public event in Louisville with Tom, because I got a great deal of media attention, and it was right before the Derby when everyone's paying attention to Louisville for for a couple of weeks a year.

That was helpful.

But we don't want to let this be seen as an urban phenomenon purely because it really isn't.

And something that I learned, I really had no idea until I looked at the stats, is that actually it's southeastern Kentucky that has the greatest incidence of this.

I'm going to Russell County and Tom's going to join this, Russell County, Kentucky is a small little population.

It's not too far from I-75 and I-75 is like all the interstates, through Kentucky is a major crime corridor.

It connects to the Canadian border and Miami.

And so we have drugs on I-75.

We have this.

And so, for us to have a presence there, it's a big deal.

The Cumberland region of our state actually is one of the hotbeds for human trafficking, of all places.

So we're doing a public training there.

It's in cooperation with the local rural hospital.

We're going to have the hospital staff, EMTs, law enforcement, state and locals, everybody there is going to be a major event.

And it's important to do this at the urban level, but also the rural level.

According to the National Human Trafficking Report Hotline, since 2007, nearly 2500 people were identified as victims of human trafficking here in Kentucky.