THE RUSH ON DRUGS

LET'S GET TO the heart of the matter: I did not, at any time, get a
wheelbarrow full of little joy pills from my housekeeper. I don't even have
a housekeeper. I do, however, have the pills. For the past nine years, I've
been addicted to the same drug as Rush Limbaugh.

OxyContin is a time-release capsule containing the active ingredient
oxycodone, which also goes into Percoset and Darvoset. The time-release
OxyContin version doesn't have a quick peak high. It offers a steady level
of pain relief over a long time, which makes it ideal for chronic pain.

In Limbaugh's case, he began taking the drug after spinal surgery. At about
the same time, nine years ago, that I started taking it, while recuperating
from a double organ transplant. That 10-hour operation left me with chronic
nerve pain that has never gotten much worse or better since. We've tried a
number of remedies, drug and otherwise, to address the pain. Oxycodone in
its various forms has been the only thing that works.

So I'm an addict, because I know that if I went too long without my dosage,
the withdrawal would make me really, really sick. It'd be nasty.

Of course, there are also about 20 other pills I take regularly. At least
one other is physiologically addictive (though without the high of
OxyContin, so nobody cares). I'm "addicted" to some of those pills in a more
profound way; were I to stop taking them, I wouldn't get withdrawal
symptoms, but my body would be more likely to reject my nonnative organs,
and I'd probably die. Those are the pills I feel really compelled to take.

I MENTION ALL THIS because in my letters and conversations I'm hearing a lot
of nonsense about Limbaugh's high-profile detox and associated legal
jeopardy. One earnest writer, after explaining how much he loves my columns,
went on to assert that it made perfect sense that Limbaugh was addicted to
OxyContin--it separates you from reality, and Limbaugh's show is evidence
enough of how much the drugs were affecting him.

Well, of course, if Limbaugh is separated from reality for that reason, so
am I. But there are problems with that notion, such as Limbaugh having made
a rather prosperous career out of his particular brand of humor and vitriol
for at least a decade before his surgery. Instead of being out of it,
Limbaugh functioned at an astonishingly high level--as one of the most
popular political commentators in America--for nearly a decade while in the
clutches of this demon drug. It couldn't have crippled him that much. So
much for the effects of a drug the head of the DEA has called a poor man's
heroin.

Limbaugh's alleged actions, however, do suggest someone physically or
psychologically addicted enough to break the law to get his fix. He was
either in pain and couldn't get his pain treated decently--a real problem
for many, but generally not someone with Limbaugh's wealth--or he was both
addicted to and abusing the drug.

That's a health problem, and it would be a private matter for Limbaugh to
resolve--if he wanted to--were it not for our celebrity culture and the
insanity of this nation's drug laws. Twenty years of antidrug propaganda has
made consumers and doctors alike wary; far more patients have their pain
undermedicated and suffer when they really shouldn't.

I've certainly got my problems, but my OxyContin addiction isn't one. Quite
the opposite. Without it, pain would unquestionably make my life a waking
hell. But even if I got high from the stuff, so what? We live in a society
where just about everybody self-medicates to deal with the pressures of our
world. Some of those medications are legal (TV, junk food, alcohol,
nicotine). Some are not. The dividing line has never made much sense; most
famously, alcohol probably kills more people in an hour than pot does in a
year.

LIKE ANY ADDICTION, Limbaugh's situation calls for health care, not
prosecution. But squabbling over the dividing line between legal and
nonlegal things we use to feel better misses a larger point. We need a
society that doesn't make so many of us feel so awful in the first place.

Never have so many people felt so alienated from either the natural world or
the social world. An awful lot of us have our version of Rush Limbaugh's
pills. In Limbaugh's case, the substance in question is both medically
legitimate and overblown as a life-destroying menace. But some people do
abuse OxyContin--just as Americans abuse an unimaginable array of other
substances. The question isn't whether laws were broken. It's why those laws
are there in the first place and why, with or without the risk of breaking
the law, so many Americans, from all walks of life, feel the need to
medicate themselves.