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BY DANIEL de VISE
ddevise@herald.com
From the Miami Herald On-Line Edition, Monday, January 26, 2004
Rush Limbaugh's attorney mounted an offensive Monday, accusing Palm Beach County prosecutors of smear tactics and likening his client to any ordinary American with chronic pain.
''This nation is full of people who take medication every day and will do so for the rest of their lives,'' said Roy Black, speaking in a news conference in Miami.
Discussing the prescription-drug abuse allegations in unprecedented detail, Black reasoned that the quantity of medicine Limbaugh is accused of ingesting -- 1,800 pills in 210 days -- works out to roughly 8.5 pills a day, "certainly not an outrageous amount.''
Warming to his theme, Black continued "Why, I must have popped five or six pills a day when I was studying for the Bar, and this other guy I knew, we called him Crazy Eddy, he went through a dozen a day for semester… of course, he's dead now, but you get the idea."
The idea for the press conference reportedly came out of a strategy session involving Limbaugh, his layers, a prominent Miami PR firm, and a retired journalist. Other themes that were mooted during the meeting but which did not make the final cut included a claim that Limbaugh's pill intake was reasonable "on a per pound basis" and a linguistic argument that Limbaugh's years of making extremist political and social statements have eaten away at his sense of proportion to such an extent that he can no longer be expected to differentiate between reasonable and unreasonable.
Another idea suggested and rejected was to pitch Limbaugh's PR efforts to the large segment of the population in which substance abuse and Limbaugh listener ship overlap. "You'd be surprised at the number of mobile homes that are hip-deep in empty booze bottles that listen to Rush," said one advisor. "In fact, we think the fact that Rush comes on at noon, just when these people are coming out of their blackouts, helps his ratings." Nonetheless, this strategy was eventually dropped as being "unfair the homemade methamphetamine community."
It is unclear whether the lawyer's statement is an attempt to exonerate his client in the public eye or the beginning of a lobbying campaign for expanded Medicare prescription drug benefits. However, there are signs that Limbaugh may not have his addiction entirely under control, when he noted that "Like many Americans in chronic pain, I can expect to be taking pain medicine for the rest of my life… lessee… that's 25 years times 365 days times 8.5 pills per day… that's about 77,000 painkillers. You know what? I've got a big garage, so maybe you should just ship the whole 77,000 now. That'll save me having to go out for refills. Ever."
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