I Spent Yesterday in the Laboratory I spent yesterday in the laboratory, conducting a rather important experiment. The idea was to attempt to enter the same realm in which conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh has spent the last five years – in a narcotics-induced haze. Generally, I eschew all forms of painkillers, but yesterday I emulated the behavior of the Mouth Almighty himself: I popped a pill, a prescription drug that was not given to me by a doctor. There was simply no other way to get a firm grip on the man's mental waxing and waning over the last several years. Someone I know had just come down with a bad toothache, and was prescribed a powerful elixir to dull that reality until he could get in for the extraction. Lortab, they gave him, which is an offshoot of hydrocodone. It's about the same as Codeine, Vicodin and Lorcet. While OxyContin was Rush's drug of choice, he was abusing these medications as well. When the guy asked me if I was in any pain, I seized on this opportunity to get into Rush's spacious head. This is a dicey matter. Understand that if my employers knew I had ingested a prescription drug that came from a bottle with someone else's name on it, and had then performed my duties as their employee, there might have been Hell to pay. In a lot of places, such behavior is a terminable offense, with no further questions asked. In my last job, as a driver, it would have been unthinkable to conduct such an experiment, as it would have put many people, including myself, at risk. But the environs in which I ply my trade today are relatively safe, so I took the chance, following Galileo's undaunted footsteps in the pursuit of science. This is a report of what it feels like to go through a workday, as Rush has done since 1998, with opiates coursing through my system. The physical side effects were a bit creepy – not that you notice much. For one thing, it makes you really itchy. The nerve endings have been fooled, thanks to the derivative of morphine, so you tend to scratch a lot. You have plenty of feeling in the places you scratch, but somehow none in the tips of your fingers as you rake at your skin. These things also tend to upset your stomach. Even though the company sprung for pizza yesterday, I was unable to enjoy that treat, as nausea would rise up every time I looked at food. Only a few moments of lost time would make the sick feeling subside. I assume that symptom goes away (or at least diminishes) with extended use, but it's not shocking at all that Limbaugh, who lost a lot of weight in the late '90s, had no appetite while under the influence of these potent narcotics. Oh, and it made my ears ring. Can't forget that. Above all else, though, the drug provided the belief that nothing could go wrong. It's not really a false sense of invincibility so much as an involuntary effort to not really care about what happens. When one feels no pain, one has no reason to put oneself in anyone else's shoes, ever. For instance, the local security guard came in yesterday and told me he was quitting his job, effective immediately, over a dispute with his boss. He's been waddling the beat for about a year now, and I see him every day. He doesn't have anything lined up for the near future; this is a walk on the plank for him. And I laughed when he told me. I laughed even harder when he presumed aloud that his employer would "freak out" when he got his faxed letter of resignation. No sympathy whatsoever for the fellow; for some reason I just couldn't muster any. As far as actual work goes, I committed a couple of errors. I put a bit of incorrect information down on some paperwork, a mistake that meant a few dollars difference on the bottom line. When it was brought to my glazed attention, I immediately became defensive, even somewhat paranoid, insisting that I had only written down what had been on the last order ... Which was wrong, of course. Whatever else the pill may or may not have done, it definitely did what it was supposed to do. At one point, I banged my kneecap on something pretty hard (I'm sporting a nice bruise there this morning). I experienced the pain at the precise moment of the blow and then for a few seconds afterward, but it went away in no time. In fact, I could feel it fading with each throb of my pulse. It fazed me only for the moment it happened, and was easily put to bed in the back of my mind, and I was able to get back into my own happy, queasy, itchy world. Coming down, I felt an odd sense of jealousy. Maybe that's not the right word. It might have been anger, only a muted, cottony anger directed half-heartedly toward myself for being unable to create this babe-in-the-womb feeling without swallowing a controlled substance. That sense of security, of unconcern, of distanced reality, should be attainable to all – but it isn't true, and can't be had without poppies. It has nothing to do with living life the way it is supposed to be, and is meant to be, lived. But with all of his money, Rush Limbaugh has long since lost sight of the plight of the common citizen. He is an insulated addict stashed away in an ivory tower, so very far away from the populist (some would say moralist) he has spent so much time portraying himself to be. I refused to label him a hypocrite for being a drug addict when this story first came out. It is no drug that makes Rush Limbaugh a hypocrite. It's easy for the richest man in radio to tread through a month-long session at a toney rehab resort and come out on the other side with an approved bill of health, his rabid audience awaiting his every non sequitur when he returns. But this man will show no respect for all of those lives that drugs have been humbled, or ruined, or taken away. In that way, he will never be healed. He lives a lie. It's easy for any addict to do; opium is a liar's favorite drug. It creates an alternate reality, one that stretches the moments to the point where they exist for too long, and in the end, not at all. A good friend of mine, who had succumbed to the pitfalls of heroin, explained to me that the stuff makes it so you could "sit in your house while it burned down around you." One pill didn't take me to that place, any more than it gave me any accurate insights into the drug's addictive properties, but I know what he was saying. Of course, Mike's dead now. These same "clean" opiates, prescribed to him by his physician, were in his bloodstream when he slipped away at the tender age of 32. So, while I conducted my experiment in a somewhat cavalier fashion, know that I do take the matter quite seriously; more so, I'm afraid, than Rush Limbaugh ever will. Paul Heller 11/12/03 << back to the archives
	All site contents © 2003, Paul F. Heller