Welcome to Huckabee at our new home on TBN from our beautiful theater in Hendersonville, TN just outside of Music City USA, Nashville, TN. For the next hour, we want you to enjoy a different kind of television show intended to inform, encourage, and entertain. I won’t be screaming at you or have guests scream at each other. To be blunt, I may have been raised poor and without money, but I was raised with manners. And I promise to treat you as my honored guest each week. I take God seriously, but I don’t take myself that seriously. I hope to put a smile on your face with some humor and variety. But to be honest, some things going on around us just aren’t funny.
Everyday in America, 91 people die a totally preventable death. The weapon of this death is not a gun, a knife, terrorism or even a car wreck. The killer is a chemical. Almost every day there’s a news story about opioids, the highly addictive drugs that are designed and sold to ease pain. If I asked if you or someone close to you have been impacted by opioids—a son, daughter, mother, father, husband, wife, brother, sister, niece, nephew, uncle, aunt, or close friend—chances are you’d say “yes.” Drug abuse and addiction touches rich and poor, white and black, urban and rural, even those of faith and those with none. And most people hooked on opioids got started legally and under the care of a physician because we begged for relief from pain. Pain is the underlying reason a person first takes an opioid drug.
Here’s a confession--I tell every doctor and nurse who treat me that I’m allergic to penicillin and pain. I have the pain threshold of a 3 year old. I’m not a tough guy and don’t even play one on TV. John Wayne is dead and I wasn’t hired to replace him. But escaping from every tinge of pain has been marketed to us as the Holy Grail. Pharmaceutical companies create drugs, then convince us through aggressive marketing that we need them—must have them! Doctors prescribe them because we want to be free of any and all pain and are willing to pay handsomely for them. And politicians of BOTH parties rake in the campaign cash as they purposefully protect the legal pushers while getting tougher on those who push the cheaper versions of dope on the streets. Big Pharma companies pour over $28 million into the purses of political campaigns and PACS. To compare, all gun groups (pro and con) give $5.8 million. The legal pill pushers get invited to the White House and mingle with the swells and members of Congress; the street dealers get sent to the Big House and mingle with the dregs of society. But the victims of opioids are just as dead whether their source was a name brand manufacturer or a 20 year old selling from his car in a Dollar Store parking lot.
I don’t want to experience pain, but pain isn’t my worst enemy—being artificially numbed into a drug-induced euphoria is my worst enemy. People and civilizations have survived millenniums of pain and suffering, but no civilization will survive a population addicted to being free of all pain but becoming even more addicted to the drugs that trade pain for pharmaceutical slavery. Pain actually has purpose. It’s necessary to know what is wrong with us, and it actually develops a toughness that drugs take from us. Even emotional pain motivates us to overcome and move forward. Therapeutically masking or subjugating our hurts that suppress all reality may not work in our best interest.
And it’s the pain in our souls and the profound guilt of our imperfections that cause us to see the frailty of our human condition and which drives us to seek God’s grace through forgiveness and find something narcotics can never give-HOPE and PEACE within.
The opioid crisis is real…it’s killing more people than the wars we’ve fought and far more than the numbers lost to terrorism or violent acts. It’s one of the topics we’ll dive into on this edition of Huckabee. Keith, what do we have for our show tonight?
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