Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers. I'm your host Andrew Heaton.

Here's a question for you. If you add up all of the medical and criminal costs plus the loss of productivity, how much

do you think addiction costs the economy every year.

Or put it another way, if we could significantly reduce addiction,

how much money would society get back to put towards better pursuits?

Keep that number in your head. I'm going to give you what the experts

say in a minute. But before I do, I want to tell you about the only television

comedy which has ever enraged me.

Brockmeyer.

Brockmeyer stars Hank Azaria, one of the main voices on the Simpsons.

He plays Jim Brockmeyer, a washed-up baseball announcer. After a nervous breakdown,

Brockmeyer spent a boosy drug-fuel decade in the Philippines where he hocked his skills calling play-by-plays for cockfights.

Now where the story begins, the drunk has been returns to America to creep back into baseball

announcing from the very bottom, calling for the anemic Morristown Frackers. The show is brilliant.

It's Hank Azaria at his finest and that's saying something because that man is an immensely

talented comedian. And there's also something that I found perpetually funny about an announcer who cannot

abandon the cadence of a professional announcer in his public or private life, even in intimate

moments. Mine is a tale of human redemption of a man who got sober and changed for the better.

Now, in my drinking days that I once marry a dog as a joke, yeah.

Am I still paying him alimony? Absolutely absolutely and I think it's the only sitcom I've ever

really been angry at not irrit I've been irritated at stuff not judgmental of the lack of humor but actually angry at because I

happened to watch season one of Brockmeyer at the same time someone I'm close

...