LIMBAUGH'S PRIVATE WAR ON DRUGS

"YOU KNOW I have always tried to be honest with you and open about my life.
So I need to tell you today that part of what you have heard and read is
correct. I am addicted to prescription pain medicine." So began Rush
Limbaugh's difficult admission to his radio audience Friday.

Limbaugh didn't say he had a "disease." He took responsibility for his
actions. He rejected the notion that he was a "victim"; he took "full
responsibility'' for his problems. Even when stumbling, he was true to his
core beliefs.

My old friend didn't tell all. When and how did his use of pain killers to
treat pain stop and the addiction begin? Will there be legal consequences?

Those answers are for another show.

Meanwhile, the media's reaction has been predictable.

First, there was the inevitable search for quotes, and it yielded up a
beaut. In 1995, Limbaugh argued that drug users "ought to be convicted and
they ought to be sent up." Responding to the fact that blacks are put
behind bars in grossly disproportionately higher rates than white drug
users, Limbaugh said that "too many whites are getting away with drug use."

I find the quote-hunt irritating. Limbaugh broke the law -- which is more
important than the stray quote on the issue.

Besides, even if there were no quote, lefties would skewer Limbaugh for
hypocrisy. Note that virtue-crat Bill Bennett's lack of hectoring against
gambling didn't spare him from being branded with the H-word.

Newsday columnist Ellis Henican intoned, "Another public moralist has been
caught in a personal jam," providing readers with the odd spectre of a
public moralist tut-tutting a different stripe of public moralist for being
a public moralist.

Well, I guess that's better than gloating.

But the worst sanctimony comes from talking-head docs who bemoan the
over-prescription of pain killers -- when inadequate pain control is the
true devil. Cancer and pain specialist Eric Chevlen of St. Elizabeth's
Hospital in Ohio told me that he has seen many patients who had bought
drugs illegally because they couldn't find doctors to prescribe medication
to curb their pain. That's an outrage.

Then there are those lefties who are so outraged that Limbaugh broke the
law that they demand he be made to serve hard time. The Drug Policy
Alliance, which opposes the "war on drugs," has shown more smarts. Better
to argue that Limbaugh shouldn't do hard time, just as other first-time
nonviolent low-level offenders should be spared prison.

Maybe now the right will listen. When I've called on presidents to commute
the sentences of federal drug offenders serving draconian sentences, I
invariably receive e-mails from readers who want first-time, nonviolent,
small-change drug offenders to serve perhaps the rest of their lives behind
bars --

in order to protect the readers' children.

The hard-time drug warriors don't appreciate that their own kids might some
day make the same bad choices. If their kids were jailed for years, or
decades, they'd likely change their tune. And maybe with their hero in the
hot seat, they'll reconsider their notions on appropriate punishment.

It is not to the right's credit that so many conservatives treat small-time
nonviolent drug-offenders as irredeemable. Or disposable.

Limbaugh is living proof to the contrary. His fate should give dittoheads
pause: How should society punish a crime for which the main victim is often
the offender himself?

Not just with a stick.