A personal anecdote:

In the mid-to-late 90’s, I was in chronic pain. I had a weak lower back that always ached, often to the point where I was laid up in bed for days at a time. There was little mystery to my condition - I’m relatively certain that it had something to do with my insistence on performing ill-advised feats of physical comedy. Sometimes these involved lifting people above my head. Sometimes I did this early in the morning, in public schools. Sometimes without stretching beforehand. In short, I was doing Dumb Things, and when those Dumb Things led to injury, I attacked the problem by… doing ‘em again.

By ‘97, my crafty strategy of “tough love” for my spine backfired, and I blew out two disks, one of which fragmented and began pressing on my spinal nerve. By the time I finally got around to the necessary surgery, I was in constant pain and had lost about 60% of the muscle mass in my frighteningly atrophying right leg. Several months of rehab followed.

You see where I’m going with this. I feel Rush Limbaugh’s pain.

I was prescribed some pretty amazing painkillers during that time, though I was loathe to use them - I wanted to know exactly how much pain I was in. Otherwise, how can you be sure you’re doing enough complaining? You may be missing out on opportunities to writhe and moan and have your loved ones bring you things, and to me that’s simply unacceptable. So I never developed a dependency.

I don’t fault Rush for becoming a drug addict, though. Pain sucks.

What I do fault Rush for is this: When you have a serious back condition and adequate medical care, it’s not too tough to get ahold of copious quantities of the good stuff. The really good stuff. Without even asking, I was offered quantities of topnotch drugs that would allow me to perform open heart surgery on myself without undue discomfort. One memorable evening I took a hot bath that I didn’t realize was burning my body until I looked at my skin afterwards. That’s how strong these drugs can be - you can comfortably make a nice soup with yourself as the stock.

My reasoning facilities remained in pretty good shape though. I was able to say things like “Hmmm. I just cooked myself. How odd.”

So if the media reports are to be believed, at some point Rush decided that his legally-obtained ultra-opiates simply weren’t enough, and he opted to start making drug deals and self-prescribing. Knowingly. That’s a big step. There’s no way to do that without being aware that you’re going behind your doctors’ backs and breaking the law. It doesn’t make Rush a Tony Montana. But it does make him a knowing criminal.

And, to me, a bit of a wuss.