The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions

An Open Letter To Eric Bolling

@ericbolling,

I’m truly sorry for your loss, but there are a few things you don’t seem to be able to grasp, or perhaps choose not to grasp.

1. Your son willingly sought out, paid for, & took the illegal substance that caused his death.

2. No one forced him to seek it out, pay for it or ingest it.

3. He did not have a medical reason for seeking it out or taking it, the fact of the matter is, he wanted to get high.

4. He was by all accounts an intelligent young man, and therefore knew very well that was he was doing was not only illegal, but dangerous.

5. He chose to do it anyway, and he chose to make all of the decisions that led up to him having done it.

They were his choices Eric, and he alone made those choices. While I can certainly understand your pain, and your desire to channel the pain his death has caused for you & your wife into something productive, and do what you can to prevent it from happening to someone else’s child or loved one, you are failing to make some very crucial distinctions as you do this.

Your son took illegal fentanyl.  It was not something prescribed by a doctor or manufactured by a drug company, it was illegally manufactured in another country, illegally smuggled into the U.S. illegally trafficked, sold, and ingested.

We already have laws in place prohibiting the manufacture and trafficking of illegal fentanyl and heroin. Those laws already in place were completely ignored by your son, those engaged in manufacturing and trafficking it, those smuggling it into our country, and those selling it to people like your son.  None of those laws prevented any of it from happening.

Therefore,  passing more laws making the LEGAL manufacture and SAFE, EFFECTIVE use of a drug CRITICAL  in operating rooms,  and for easing the pain of those suffering from incurable/progressive/excruciatingly painful conditions, diseases, surgical procedures, and injuries making the safe, legal use of it under these conditions illegal,  will do absolutely nothing to prevent those who, like your son want to obtain it and use it illegally to get high,  anymore than the strict gun laws in the city of Chicago prevent gang bangers from obtaining guns and killing innocent people with those illegally obtained guns by the thousands.

It will/is however,  making it increasingly impossible for those who truly need the medication in its safe effective legally produced form to get it, and doom them to suffering needlessly.

The actions of yourself and others, no matter how well intended, have indeed not stopped or even reduced the manufacture and sale of illegal substances, nor have they stopped or reduced the subsequent deaths from those substances. This is FACT.

Quite the opposite has in fact happened. There are tens of thousands more overdose deaths due to illegal/illegally obtained street drugs now than there were two years ago, and millions of chronic pain patients including Veterans & those who, like myself suffer from incurable excruciatingly painful conditions & disease processes are now, not only unable to have their pain adequately and appropriately treated w/safe effective opiate pain medications, they are unable to find physicians willing to treat and care for them, and as a result are committing suicide due entirely to pain.

You and those like you,  intent upon spewing insufficient, inaccurate and incomplete information and propaganda have created a positively mid evil denial of pain treatment for those who legitimately need those medications to function and have quality of life.  Because of those denials, tens of thousands of those patients have/are committing suicide as their only means to escape/stop their constant unrelenting pain.

I understand your intent was never for this to have happened, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions sir, tens of thousands of parents, children, spouses, and loved ones are mourning the loss of their loved ones as I write this, not because their father, mother, son, daughter, brother or sister wanted to get high, and chose to seek out, pay for, and take an illegal substance, but rather because their lives were consumed with unimaginable, inescapable physical pain and misery they had no choice in.  For which they can not/could not find adequate medical treatment, or in many cases any treatment at all. So when faced with the reality that every second of the rest of their lives would consist of nothing but misery and horrendous pain with no hope of relief, they are killing themselves.

This sir is “suicide due to pain.”  It is what you and those like you are creating by your actions.

Whats worse is that you seem completely oblivious to it.  You frequent news programs and talk shows, are featured in newspaper and magazine articles telling the world the sad tale of your sons death, but you fail each and EVERY time to mention that your son took illegal fentanyl. That he sought it out and paid for it to obtain a high. That he was well aware that his actions were illegal, dangerous, and that he had no legitimate reason for having ingested that illegal substance.

You fail to mention sir, that there are millions of Americans, including Veterans who need long term treatment of their intractable pain with safe effective opiate pain medications which have been developed and manufactured for exactly this purpose, and that those who legitimately need such medications should NEVER be prohibited from obtaining them to ease their misery, pain and suffering.

Because you fail to mention these things, you have perpetuated a catastrophic problem of unimaginable proportions, the true scope of which we will likely not find out for decades to come, if ever.

If you truly want to help solve the problem, and make sure that something good comes of the death of your son, do it by telling the world the truth, and the whole story, not just enough to paint a skewed picture that harms countless innocent sick, disabled, elderly, Veterans, cancer patients, and  chronic pain sufferers  in the process!

I am Passionate Pachyderms, The Brutally Honest Elephant In Every Room, And I Tell It Like It Is.