There are more challenges now for people who live at the intersection of addiction, homelessness and the criminal justice system. New laws in about a dozen states echo aspects of the 2024 Safer Kentucky Act, which enhances penalties for violent crimes, drug crimes, shoplifting and carjacking, and bans public camping. On this encore episode of Us & Them, host Trey Kay returns to Kentucky to check on the consequences of the new tough-on-crime law. In cities, the demand for long term and transitional housing remains acute, while in small town Appalachia the access to any social safety net can be far, far away.

Children are often described as the future. But in many rural communities across America, the path to bringing a child into the world is getting longer — sometimes literally. Across the country, families are traveling farther and farther from home to deliver babies. Since the end of 2020, 124 rural hospitals have closed or announced plans to close their labor-and-delivery units — about two closures a month. As small hospitals struggle with rising costs and staffing shortages, obstetrics departments are often among the first services to disappear. In this encore episode of Us & Them, host Trey Kay hears from families living with those changes — and explores what the loss of maternity care could mean for the future of rural towns and communities.

America’s overdose crisis keeps changing shape.

In recent years, provisional CDC data have shown a sharp national decline in overdose deaths — even as public officials warn the street drug supply remains volatile and some communities see signs of a rebound.

That uncertainty is also reshaping the recovery world — especially around opioids. Some people find abstinence-based recovery works best. Others rely on medication-assisted treatment (MAT), using prescribed medicine like methadone or buprenorphine to stabilize a person and reduce the risk of relapse. But MAT has long divided the recovery community, fueling a stigma around a deceptively simple question:

When is someone sober?

In this encore episode of Us & Them, Trey Kay visits the Clarksburg Mission in Clarksburg, West Virginia — a Christian-centered recovery facility where people pursue different paths toward sobriety — and where debates about medication, morality, and survival are never abstract.