ABOUT THOSE DRUG TIRADES . . .

Limbaugh May Not Want Rants From Previous Years Recalled

"Let's all admit something."

Rush Limbaugh was on his usual tear.

"There's nothing good about drug use," he was saying. "We know it. It
destroys individuals. It destroys families. Drug use destroys societies.
Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws
against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. And the
laws are good because we know what happens to people in societies and
neighborhoods which become consumed by them. And so if people are violating
the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be
convicted and they ought to be sent up."

And this includes zillionaire radio hosts?

When you have a talk-radio show 15 hours a week, you have an awful lot of
air to fill. On this particular day, which was Oct. 5, 1995, Rush was
roaring about the scourge of illegal drug use.

Even though blacks and whites break the drug laws in roughly equal
percentages, he noted, black druggies go to prison far more often than
white druggies do. But to the liberal-bashing host, this was no reason to
ease up on blacks.

"What this says to me," he told his listeners, "is that too many whites are
getting away with drug use. Too many whites are getting away with drug
sales. Too many whites are getting away with trafficking in this stuff. The
answer to this disparity is not to start letting people out of jail because
we're not putting others in jail who are breaking the law. The answer is to
go out and find the ones who are getting away with it, convict them and
send them up the river, too."

Including zillionaire radio hosts?

What a week it's been for Rush.

First, he gets chased out of ESPN in a furor over a remark about race. Then
he is accused in Florida of buying thousands of powerful painkillers from
an illegal drug-selling ring.

His 42-year-old housekeeper, Wilma Cline, says she dealt closely controlled
pills to America's top-rated syndicated radio host. OxyContin. Hydrocodone.
Highly addictive opiates. A gargantuan number of pills over several years,
she says -- almost 100 a day on one 47-day binge. Some were hidden under
his mattress so his wife wouldn't find them. Others were passed in a
Denny's parking lot.

The story was broken by the National Enquirer, but it's already burst into
the mainstream media. Reports of secret tapes. Incriminating e-mails.
Twice, Limbaugh reportedly checked himself into rehab -- and later relapsed.

What pain, what disappointment, what insecurity could explain something
like this? The talker wasn't talking about that Thursday when the news broke.

Understandably so.

If the report is true, another public moralist will have been caught in a
personal jam. And Rush's words will come back to haunt him.

The constant digs at Bill Clinton not inhaling.

The heartless shrug when Jerry Garcia died.

"When you strip it all away," Rush had said of the Grateful Dead guitarist,
"Jerry Garcia destroyed his life on drugs. And yet he's being honored, like
some godlike figure. Our priorities are out of whack, folks."

Rush Limbaugh wouldn't be the first prominent finger-pointer to eat his own
words. It wasn't so long ago that Bill Bennett was explaining how an
anti-vice crusader could also be a gambler.

Jeb Bush, the president's brother and Limbaugh's governor, was pleading for
leniency and privacy when his daughter was arrested for drugs. Yet he'd
been happily sending other Florida youngsters to long prison terms for
similar crimes.

Typical.

But there in the dusty Limbaugh archives, one glimmer of sanity did appear.

It came from 1998, just about the time Wilma Cline's black-market drug ring
was reportedly revving up. Rush was on the radio. He was talking about
America's "half-baked" war on drugs.

We might all be better off, he said quite plainly, if drugs were legalized
- -- and then regulated like cigarettes.

"What is missing in the drug fight," he said, "is legalization. If we want
to go after drugs with the same fervor and intensity with which we go after
cigarettes, let's legalize drugs. Legalize the manufacture of drugs.
License the Cali cartel. Make them taxpayers and then sue them. Sue them
left and right, and then get control of the price and generate tax revenue
from it. Raise the price sky high and fund all sorts of other wonderful
social programs."

Was he serious? I'm not sure.

But the timing is interesting, you'd have to say. And I'll bet he quotes
those words again.