Welcome to the Eric Erickson Show podcast, Hour One.

Hello, America. Welcome. It is Eric Erickson here. Across the nation, delighted to have you.

The phone number is 877-97-9-3-7-4-25. Should you wish to be on the program,

glad to have you with me. I want to start with a story that I really don't want to talk about,

but have to talk about. A newspaper publisher told me a while back that the story that drives down ratings, the story

that drives down newspaper sales, the story that no one wants to talk about is the drug crisis,

because everybody is affected in some way or knows someone

who is and nobody wants to hear about it. They know how bad it is. So if you spend a lot of time

covering it on TV or radio or newspapers, your subscriptions plummet, your viewership, your listenership,

everything goes down. It's very interesting to hear newspaper TV and radio people talk about this because it's something they have to cover, but they cover as delicately as possible because people are depressed by the story.

Understandably so.

I slept in this morning.

My buddy Joe Cunningham, he's on KPL in Lafayette, Louisiana, 96.5 over there.

I worked with me at Red State.

He had a text message waiting for me.

This is the most important story of the day, he thinks.

And I read it, and I think he's right.

This is in the Washington Post.

Cause of death, Washington faltered as fentanyl crisis gripped America. Now, before I get into

the story, and I wrote about it, I wasn't going to write a morning piece, and I read the story.

It's like, yeah, this needs circulation. This needs breath in this. So let me tell you, and this is from another story, and I can't put my finger on

the story. I know where I got it from. And I just, I wasn't able to track it down right before

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