RUSH THE JUNKIE DESERVES BETTER TREATMENT THAN HE'D ALLOW OTHERS

Rush Limbaugh a drug addict?

Whether you admire Rush or detest him (and few people are simply neutral),
these charges must come as a shock. The conservative Mr. Limbaugh, no
surprise, has zero public sympathy for drug abusers and has publicly stated
they should be incarcerated.

Mr. Limbaugh's defenders will doubtless portray Rush as a victim - a man
whose post-surgery pain forced him to take narcotics, which, in turn,
enslaved this heroic man. Critics will see Limbaugh as no different from
any other junkie - turning to narcotics not for pain relief, but for those
forbidden joys that only opiates can confer - joys that people have chased
ever since discovering the Opium Poppy eons ago.

But while this fight rages, a bigger point will be missed. Mr. Limbaugh has
allegedly been taking massive doses of narcotics - thousands of pills a
month. How come he's been able to run his radio empire and maintain his
keen-edged performance?

The drug-warriors constantly paint a picture of the junkie as an
unemployed, unemployable, outcast - filthy and degraded. Does this sound
like Rush Limbaugh to you?

The fact is that narcotic addicts can - if adequately supplied with their
drugs - lead perfectly productive lives. One of America's foremost surgeons
was a hopeless morphine addict who - so long as he had his drugs -
performed flawlessly, and contributed mightily to American medicine. In
various European countries addicts have been supplied with clean narcotics,
and have lived quite boringly normal lives.

Mr. Limbaugh's money and power made it possible for him to feed his
addiction with pharmaceutical-grade narcotics. The poor amongst us must
make do with filthy heroin and dirty syringes. To get the same rush as
Rush, they pay inflated prices, suffer festering abscesses and risk deadly
overdoses.

Because of his position, Mr. Limbaugh will not go to jail no matter what
the outcome of this investigation. Nor should he.

Addiction should be treated as the medical problem it is. It makes as much
sense to incarcerate someone for narcotic addiction as for congestive heart
failure. But the same compassion we show to Limbaugh should be granted to
the poor among us.