$300,000 buys a lot of pain relief:
Rush Limbaugh Laundered Money Used to Pay for Drugs
In this, the age of terror, where it’s common knowledge that drug money goes to finance pilot training for al Qaeda operatives, or RPG’s for America hating Baathists, how could Rush do such a thing? Someone at least tell me that he’s turned in his pusher and is cooperating with the Feds in rooting out the snakes he succored to his breast. Anything less would be treason*.
SNORT! Geddy Lee thinks he’s some kind of a fucking philosopher or something, but I think he’s just a wanker. Someone who wanks with a guitar is still just a wanker!
But he has my permission to take all the drugs he wants to, if it will help to deflate him.
Wait. Was this thread about Rush Limbaugh? Never mind!
Actually, Neil Peart writes all the lyrics, not Geddy. Neil is the one who thinks he’s a philosopher. He’s a great drummer, though…and Geddy Lee is a kick ass bassist. I never could quite get into Geddy’s voice, though. It’s a little too banshee for my taste.
Let’s not forget Alex Lifeson, who plays some tasty guitar parts.
Anyone know how I can get my mitts on Lifeson’s solo record?
Ah, yes. The best drum solo I ever heard was at a Rush concert.
I actually like Geddy’s voice. I think Rush would sound very odd if they had a competent vocalist. 
Spooje – do a search for “victor cd” on Ebay. I believe there’s an auction for one listed that’s set to expire some time tomorrow.
Lifeson’s solo record is called ‘Victor’. And it should be available from Amazon…
Here:
It’s pretty interesting music. It’s clear from the get-go that’s him on guitar. He can be distinctive.
And here’s a joke for the Rush crowd…
Is that an instrumental CD, or does he attempt vocalization?
[sub]pleasetellmehedoesnttrytosingpleaseplease[/sub]
Today’s Rush Limbaugh gets high on you…
Damn straight. I like those two albums more than Roll the Bones and TfE.
Victor is interesting, but it’s clearly not Rush. The Big Dance is a great song though, and should be played at an absurd volume. Very agressive.
spooje, Lifeson doesn’t really sing on the album, although he recites a poem, and talks. He hired a few outside singers for his songs, Dalbello and that guy from I mother earth come to mind.
Unless Al Qaeda own shares in whichever MegaDrugCorp makes Oxycontin, then I think he’s on safe ground there.
I’ve seen it go either way – I’ve interviewed people on huge doses of opioids (I’ll restrict the term “huge doses” to greater than 10,000mg of morphine per day) for genuine chronic pain, and for plain old addiction. So Dr. Fisher may be right. On the other hand, of the people on huge doses of opioids, about 66% were addicts. So not only is it not certain that Dr. Fisher is correct, it seems unlikely.
My experience is that most addicts who claim to be having pain are doing so because they have to – pain is the only legitimate use for the drugs they take, so they lie. It is true that withdrawing from the opioids they’re taking causes hyperalgesia, an amplification of any pain that is experienced – the addicts I interviewed generally agreed that during withdrawal, a hangnail or a stubbed toe is incredibly painful, much more so than usual. And thus, many of the ordinary discomforts of life that we take for granted – aches and pains, etc. – can be highly exaggerated during opioid withdrawal. Perhaps that is the source of the phantom pain to which you refer? In any case, many of the addicts I interviewed who claimed to be in pain eventually said that whatever pain they were feeling wasn’t really the reason they continued taking opioids – that, even though the physical symptoms of opioid withdrawal were painful and awful to go through, they could have tolerated the short period of suffering and given up opioids for good, if it weren’t for the overpowering cravings that then occurred. One of them described the craving as “worse than being hungry and thirsty and horny and itchy all at the same time.”
Anyway, I know that many opioid addicts will claim the reason for their opioid consumption is pain control, but I don’t think the pain they feel is anything like the pain that real chronic pain patients (who are using opioids for pain control) have. And it’s often not hard to tell the two apart. (But not always. Sometimes it is hard. How’s that for bet hedging?)
Alex does some spoken word on Victor. Most of the vocals are done by Edwin of I Mother Earth, with some pretty good belting by a woman named Dalbello.
There are some instrumentals (I particularly like “Strip and Go Naked”).
The lyrical content is definitely not Rush!
I got the phrase “phantom pain” from a casual conversation with a doctor once about opoid addiction. He said that withdrawal causes “phantom pain” because the brain wants the opiate. He was probably just simplifying things for a layman.
He also said that people with genuine pain will not necessarily become addicted or have as much trouble getting off of the drugs. Is that true?
Well, there is a lot of misconception out there about opioid addiction, even among doctors – you probably now know more than that doctor about it now, unless he or she is a specialist in this area. 
But one could take the hyperalgesia and cravings of opioid withdrawal and call them “phantom pain” for short – though that might get confused with the “phantom pain” which is associated with amputation of limbs (and that “phantom” pain is quite real, despite originating in the brain instead of from an injury). There is a popular concept called “analgesic rebound pain,” which occurs when people get used to taking a pain reliever constantly and then stop taking it, but I think of this as hyperalgesia, the amplification of minor existing pain, rather than true phantom pain created by the sudden cessation of a pain reliever regimen.
Absolutely. In fact, three separate studies (I don’t have the references in front of me, but I can find them if anybody is interested – I believe at least one of the studies was conducted by the National Institutes of Health, possibly two of them) found this to be true.
They found that the rate of “problem usage” of opioids for people who were given opioids for the first time to treat legitimate pain was about 3 patients out of 10,000. All three studies had similar numbers – I believe one was 1 problem user out of 6,000 patients, and another was 5 problem users out of 25,000 patients. In any case, those numbers show that it’s very rare for people with genuine pain to become addicted to pain medication.
In many cases, people who had been on relatively high doses (say, 100mg of morphine per day) of opioids for pain control have been able to cease taking opioids immediately upon surgical correction of the pain-causing problem, without even needing to gradually taper off the medication.[sup]1[/sup]
This isn’t always the case, of course – usually people on long-term opioid regimens will develop tolerance and physical dependence just like an addict. But tolerance and physical dependence are not the same thing as addiction – addiction is when the user feels that the drug is necessary to live a normal life, and when the user will go to extreme lengths to get ahold of the drug (hence the term I used above, “problem usage patterns.”)
Even when pain patients are physically dependent on opioids, though, they can almost always stop using them (once they no longer need them, of course) without all the trouble that a real addict has – they look at the drugs as an inconvenience and are all too glad to be rid of them, while addicts feel that the drugs are good and necessary, and often they feel unable to cope with life without the help of drugs.
In any case, I’m … oh, crap, it’s 8:30 in the morning, and coincidentally, I’m late for an appointment – I have a couple of interviews to do at a local methadone clinic. I’ll hurry and post this before I leave. I’ll be glad to talk more when I get back, if anybody cares.
[sup]1[/sup]Kind of like what happened to Woody Harrelson’s character in the movie The People vs. Larry Flynt – I don’t know how true-to-life it was, but in the movie, he had been taking opioids for chronic pain from his gunshot injury, and after most of the pain was corrected surgically, he was able to stop taking the drugs immediately. Not so for his wife, played by Courtney Love, who had started taking his drugs recreationally and who was a full-fledged addict.
Whoa, Coldfire!
Almost a simulpost/hijack!
Whoa, Coldfire!
Almost a simulpost/hijack!
(Dammit, I just got a “Document contains no data” message, so here goes again. Hope I don’t double post.)
Although the article linked in Beagle’s post states that Rush made other comments that suggested he would support legalization, the Limbaugh quote that is provided I would interpret differently.
In its context, he doesn’t seem to suggest that legalization would be a good thing, or something that he would support. Instead, he appears to bring that up to drive home his actual point of criticizing the intensity of legal assaults on tobacco products. He makes the sarcastic suggestion that drugs be legalized so that "we . . . go after drugs *with the same fervor and intensity * with which we go after cigarettes . . . "
I just find the idea of Rush ever expressing support for drug legalization hard to believe.
El Gui,
I’m with you on that one. I think his “legalisation”? (that’s the only way I can write that) position was pretty odd.
I’m not for legalisation of all opiates. I guess even my libertarian idealistic streak ends at the junk’s edge. OTOH, egads, what is the point of denying existing addicts their drugs in the hopes that they won’t go to the streets? They will. Or, clean needles? Addicts will use the old dirty one.
Moreover, the way some doctors approach pain management…
Well, let me put it this way. I was at an EMS convention in Syracuse – in so much pain I was fantasizing about suicide by cop or jumping in one of the police vans with the big German shepherds. Would any dentist help me? NO.
chorpler,
I’m glad we have some balance on the whole “too much to get high” thing. That seemed absurd on its face.