Economic downturn and the opioid epidemic hurt this town, but it is growing again on its own terms

New restaurants and food trucks provide gathering
spaces in Hazard, Kentucky. (The Free Press photo)

In Hazard, Kentucky, opioid addictions ravage the town, which had once been part of Appalachia's bustling coal mining region. "After the collapse of coal mining and the rise of the opioid epidemic, Hazard, Kentucky, seemed finished. Then locals started to rescue it," reports Sam Quinones for The Free Press in Los Angeles. "In early 2020, Mandi Fugate Sheffel, 42, opened a tiny bookstore in her hometown of Hazard, in eastern Kentucky. Everyone thought she was crazy."

The Read Spotted Newt is a thriving
small business. (RPN logo)

Despite a complicated personal story and the area's economic stress, Sheffel saw a community worth lifting up. "She loved to read — particularly contemporary Appalachian authors like Silas House, James Still, and Gurney Norman, who told stories that felt real to her," Quinones writes. "She figured others in town were tired, like her, of driving two hours to Lexington to buy books. So, on January 30, she opened Read Spotted Newt in a 250-square-foot space — the size of a small bedroom."

Hazard had once been prosperous, but in the 1990s, coal declined, and as jobs and people left the region, the use of opioids spread in the region. Quinones reports, "About the only new local businesses were 'pill mills'—clinics that prescribed huge quantities of prescription painkillers."

"But then, weirdly and unexpectedly, at the same time that everything was falling apart, things started to get better — and that old world started, very tentatively, to build itself back up," Quinones writes. "In the past few years, some 43 businesses have opened in Hazard, creating 171 new jobs, said Bailey Richards, the town's coordinator of downtown development. . . In Hazard, about a quarter of the new jobs are held by recovering people with an addiction."

Despite the loss of coal, eastern Kentucky is growing in other ways.
(The Free Press photo)

Places like Hazard aren't waiting for big business or industry to save them. "In Prestonsburg, an hour north of Hazard, there are now five locally owned restaurants, all but one of which opened in the last five years," Quinones reports. "Instead of trying to lure massive out-of-state companies with tax incentives, [communities are] thinking about beautification projects and homeowners and places where people could congregate."

While drug problems are still real and regional progress ebbs and flows, "people here have stopped waiting for outsiders — coal companies, big-box retailers, Frankfort, Washington — to save them," Quinones writes. Stephanie Callahan, a former addict and current business owner in Hazard, told him: "When somebody gets clean, they want to change the world. . . . You do something just to prove you can do it."