December 5, 2003 - When the story broke that Rush Limbaugh had admitted his addiction and entered a treatment program I wrote that I would not have any further comment about the conservative talk show polemicists drug case. I have kept that pledge. This morning I am going to bend it. The fact that Limbaugh is addicted to drugs is independent from his expression of far right political positions supported by doubtful and distorted facts. He was peddling that product long before he tossed back that first pill.

What changed this morning was the number of talking heads appearing on the cable news shows to excuse his alleged criminal acts because his addiction is claimed to stem from his medical condition. The thrust of their argument is that his alleged excursion into the criminal drug market should be ignored because his addiction was a byproduct of medical treatment. Their common thesis is that Rush is a victim and that he should be treated as a victim and not as a criminal.

An addict is an addict, whether the addiction stems from a medical practitioners too free prescription of addictive opiates to relieve physical pain or self-medication to relieve psychological pain. The effects of that addiction are no different for the addict who acquired his addiction through a socially approved mechanism or succumbed to the lure of using chemicals to alter his perceptions of reality. The user of crack cocaine whose addiction supports the illegal drug market is as much a victim of his addiction as is Rush Limbaugh. He is just as driven and just as powerless to control his chemical dependence as is Mr. Limbaugh. Some addicts are fortunate in that they can, like Mr. Limbaugh, function despite their addiction and can support it without resort to further criminal activity.

Which brings me to the point of this essay. We have spent millions of dollars in a vain attempt to control an illegal market that supports millions of addicts around the world. Criminalizing addiction has not worked. It has only made the black market for addictive chemicals the more lucrative and the lure of the forbidden the more strong.

We need to treat the victims of chemical dependence not punish them. If Rush Limbaugh's addiction and his alleged foray into crime are to be treated as the illness that its is, so too should the illness of less affluent and functional addicts be treated. Treatment programs coupled with decriminalization and regulation of the market place can be supported by taxation of the addictive products. Rush Limbaugh is a poster-child for that approach.