@Typo-MAGAshiv

His discussions did not include people who were led to addiction by their doctors,

Dude, I was in a position of listening to all three hours of his radio show, every day, for literally half a decade. Therefore, I can say with certainty: Rush did NOT, I mean not fucking once EVER, clarify, caveat, offer exceptional or outlier cases, that could in any way get even perceived as "diluting/softening" his hard-line positions on issues, particularly that of drugs. Even "legal" pharmaceuticals, he stood hard for the for-profit model, and vilified every other alternative as "socialized medicine, a slippery slope directly to full Communist takeover of the USA."

So yes, he was HARD in favor of the status quo that financially incentivizes doctors, hospital systems, and pharmaceutical companies, to push pills for money, and fuck all the guardrails around those with abuse potential. And, he wasn't just speaking in a vacuum. He was nationally syndicated, with an audience of tens of millions, who called themselves "Dittoheads" which as repeated on-air meant "I love you and completely agree with and believe everything you say!"

Thus, he modeled ideas, behaviors, and attitudes for the entire American Right Wing culture. His platform and positions, therefore held a symbiotic relationship with the culture and positions of law enforcement up to and including Federal agencies (classic example Chief Darryl Gates saying publicly, "Casual drug users ought to be taken out and SHOT!"), legislative bodies therefore the drafting, enactment, and enforcement of drug laws and literally tens of millions of dollars per year budgeted for interdiction and enforcement activities.

For my part, I was closely involved with the "legalize hemp/cannabis" movement, therefore a ground level soldier intimately involved in the "Drug War," Immersed in it personally, not a casual pundit on the sidelines with no more skin in the game than agreeing with a fat fuck radio host.

SO, for one of THE. TOP. players in the entire 2 decade drug war vertical industry and legislative machine, who in service of this position expressed the harshest possible treatment of OTHER drug users, to carve out a personal exception, and to selectively do the opposite of the entire corpus of his expressed position on the entire thing, is COMPLETELY out of the fucking question. When it came down to him personally, "falling victim" to the same human foibles and weaknesses he spent literally thousands of hours condemning others for; he deserves ZERO compassion, mercy, empathy, and other such things he also condemned personally, and claimed belonged to his ideological opposites, "The Left", when it suited him and the entire breadth and height of his hard line positions on drugs and their users.