Opioids Ravaged a Kentucky Town. Then Rehab Became Its Business.
December 12, 2024 at 11:50PMAddiction Recovery Care, or ARC, has become the biggest company in Louisa, Kentucky. It’s helped those with opioid abuse issues get clean, and it’s trained them for jobs both inside and outside ARC. But its success hasn’t necessarily been embraced by the townspeople. Oliver Whang approaches the matter—and the town, and those living in it—with nuance and humanity.
The more enmeshed ARC became with Louisa, the more complicated the recovery dynamics grew. The company and town formed a polychrome ball of altruistic idealism, entrepreneurial ambition and small-town drama. To analyze, for example, the financial benefits of ARC without factoring in the stigma around addiction or the politics of religion or the sentimental attachment lifelong residents formed with their hometown would be like trying to extract the blue Play-Doh out of the brown blend you get after massaging all the colors together. When Lisa Robertson, a real estate agent with an office in downtown Louisa, praised the company and offered me two extra tickets to “Little Shop of Horrors,” showing at the ARC-run Garden Theater, was it because ARC had been good for her business or because she was happy that they were “saving a lot of people” or because she had her lawn mowed by ARC’s Second Chance Lawn Care or because she sent her two children to the ARC-run private school? When Tracie Cavins, who owns a novelties store off South Main Cross Street, told me that she saw a lot more homeless people around town than she did 10 years ago and that she didn’t feel it was safe to “come here by myself at night,” was that because she was frustrated that ARC has been buying up all the neighboring properties? Or because the company brought more people in addiction to town for treatment or because she distrusted a corporation, with a single man at the helm, exerting outsize influence over her town?
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/12/12/opioids-ravaged-a-kentucky-town-then-rehab-became-its-business/
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