Kentucky Drug Policy Chief Van Ingram to Retire After 22 Years

Van Ingram, who has run Kentucky's Office of Drug Control Policy since 2008 and worked in it since 2004, will retire at the end of the year, Governor Andy Beshear announced at a press conference in Frankfort on Wednesday. Tara Hyde, chief executive of the recovery advocacy group People Advocating Recovery and herself in long-term recovery, will take the job.

Ingram came to the office from the Maysville Police Department, where he spent 23 years including six as chief. Governors of both parties kept him on, a point Beshear made when announcing the transition.

"There are caring people all over state government, in every cabinet and every agency, that have worked to bring this problem under control, as well as the Administrative Office of the Courts, the General Assembly, have all played a big part in our success," Ingram said.

A tenure bracketed by two different epidemics

When Ingram joined the office in 2004, Kentucky's overdose problem was still measured largely in prescription painkillers diverted from medicine cabinets. He was at the desk in 2017, when the state recorded 1,565 overdose deaths, then a record, and he was there through the fentanyl era that followed and pushed the toll far higher.

The last several years ran in the opposite direction. Kentucky's 2025 Drug Overdose Fatality Report, released in April, showed fatalities down nearly 23 percent from 2024 — the fourth consecutive annual decline and a more than 50 percent drop from the state's 2021 peak. Ingram's office compiles that report and coordinates much of the state's response, from naloxone distribution to the deployment of opioid settlement dollars.

The office is not a regulator. It has no licensing authority over treatment providers and no enforcement powers. Its leverage is convening: pulling health agencies, corrections, courts, law enforcement and community groups into a single strategy and reporting publicly on what the state spends. In a crisis that runs through a dozen agencies, that role has proved unusually durable — and unusually dependent on who holds it.

A successor from the recovery community

Hyde has led People Advocating Recovery, a Kentucky nonprofit built around people with lived experience of substance use, and has been in recovery since 2011. Her appointment puts a person who has used the treatment system at the head of the office that coordinates it.

"Since being in recovery and overcoming addiction, I've found a real passion for helping people, for getting people access to services and for creating new services when they didn't exist," Hyde said. "That's why I've made it my life's work to support recovery services as well as individuals who are actively seeking help."

She added that she looks forward to supporting Kentuckians "fighting addiction and going through substance use disorder treatment, recovery support services, looking for housing and gaining access to meaningful, passionate lives — because that's what we all deserve."

The shift mirrors a broader pattern in state drug policy, where peer recovery organizations and people with lived experience have moved from the edge of the table to its center. It is also a bet that someone who used the system will see its gaps faster than a career administrator — a claim that will be tested by the same constraints every state office faces.

What the office inherits

Hyde takes over an agency whose mandate keeps expanding while its authority stays soft. Kentucky has been distributing hundreds of millions of dollars in opioid settlement payments through a process the office helps coordinate, and it maintains a public dashboard tracking how that money is spent. The state's overdose decline is real but fragile: fentanyl remains the dominant substance in fatality reports, and the decline has been uneven across counties, with rural areas lagging urban ones.

Ingram's departure also closes out one of the longest tenures in state drug policy at a moment when the role itself is in flux. West Virginia's drug control director resigned on October 1, weeks after being reassigned under a cabinet secretary — a reminder that the job's influence depends less on statute than on the governor who appoints it.

Kentucky's next drug policy chief starts in January. Before then, the office will publish year-end figures that will establish the baseline Hyde inherits — and, if the four-year trend holds, the first state report in a decade that reads as consolidation rather than crisis.