So let's wrap our heads around this; Tommy gets 9 months for paraphinalia and Rush goes to rehab in spite of trafficing in 1000s of pills. I'm not saying Rush should go to jail; I wouldn't advocate sending an addict to prision, much as the perverse irony of forcing the mother of all windbags to follow his own advice appeals to the political warrior in me. It would be fun, but it would also be wrong.

Let's talk about the truth and chemicals. It's true that drug use, abuse and addiction can all be destructive for individuals and communities. It's also true that none of these are necessarily so, that in fact the reverse may be true depending on the individual circumstances and the substance involved. It's also true that sending people to prison is perhaps the most expensive and least effective way of dealing with the social problems that drugs create. Finally, it also seems true that if we're going to have a free society, that freedom aught to include chemical liberty, the recognition that our bodies are our own property, and as such we have sovereignty over our own phisiology.

Perhaps Rush's admission will cause the mindlocked debate over drugs in our society to shamble forward a step or two. Perhaps it will cause people to stop demogauging about substances and start thinking about how we might inject a little sanity into our legislative system. I think it will probably take a new generation -- probably mine since generation X seems to do fuck-all -- to get this country off it's 100-year puritan rampage and back into the smooth groove of reason. It's going to take people stepping away from ideology and lore and into the realities of human experience. On a meta level, this is movement that's picking up steam, so maybe there's cause for hope yet.