 At Audiology Associates of Prestonsburg, you can live your life the way you want and find the freedom of better hearing with 40 years of being in the hearing care industry. You'll experience patient care that is specific to you with exceptional follow-up care that ensures your hearing and balance needs are being met. Audiology Associates at 1428 Northlake Drive in Prestonsburg. Dream.org kicked off their public health is public safety campaign Wednesday, April 19th at the Jenny Wiley Convention Center. The campaign focuses on substance use disorder, mental health, harm reduction, and lowering recidivism rates. Harm reduction is huge. We can't have people recover if they're not alive. So anything we can do to help keep those people alive, that's a big key of harm reduction. But harm reduction also encompasses housing, transportation, food, clothing. It's not just syringe exchanges and MAT clinics. It's a whole spectrum of things and it's a lot of basic needs that people need and it's a way to help get people in that transition from active addiction into recovery. From May 2020 to April 2021, over 100,000 people died from overdoses in the United States. Harm reduction works to prevent overdose deaths and infectious disease transmission and improve physical, mental and social well-being for those struggling with addiction. Harm reduction is so important in this. Not everybody wants to stop right now. And if we can't get people to stop immediately, we have to meet them where they're at and give them the resources to keep them alive so we can get them into recovery so they can become a productive member of society. And if we don't do these services, then we're going to lose a whole other generation of Kentuckians and people cannot recover if they already did. It's not just one single area of Kentucky that's affected by the opioid epidemic or fentanyl that needs harm reduction. It's 120 counties wide. It's from, you know, Pikeville over to Paduca and everywhere in between. And that's what we want to do with this tour is encompass the whole state and really show people that this is a state problem. It's not a us versus them problem. It's not a black or white problem. It's not an urban or rural problem. It is a Kentucky problem and it's from one border to the other. For more information on harm reduction, go to dream.org. Reporting for Mountain Top News, I'm Brianna Robinson.