A Customs inspector going through the baggage of conservative radio show host Rush Limbaugh on Monday afternoon found 29 small blue tablets — a supply of the impotence drug Viagra.
Trouble is, the name on the bottle wasn’t Limbaugh.
”Limbaugh said it was for his own personal use and that the name on it was his doctor’s,” said Sgt. Pete Palenzuela, a spokesman for the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.
Possession of drugs prescribed to someone else is a second-degree misdemeanor.
Well, worse than being a class 2 misdemeanor, the possession could result in a revocation of the "deal" he worked out with prosecutors — a deal which ended up in a dismissal of prior charges against him. If this story pans out to be true, Rush could be back in the doghouse and looking at reinstitution of all prior drug and doctor-shopping charges against him.
Firedoglake looks at the legal perspective in more depth:
Just so we are clear, in every jurisdiction that I know of, getting your drug prescriptions in someone else’s name is not legal.
That goes double when you are on probation supervision: in order to accurately assess the urine samples, probation officers have to have on file a copy of every prescription — drug name, dosage, frequency, etc. — to send to the company that does the chemistry profiles and testing on the urine screen. If the person under supervision tries to circumvent that process by getting prescriptions in someone else’s name, well that doesn’t provide adequate information for purposes of assessment — and it’s a violation of the supervision requirements, let alone a whole new set of legal violations. (Unless, of course, Rush informed the probation office that he intended to break the law by having prescriptions written in someone else’s name. Which would be highly unlikely…)
According to attorney Roy Black, a doctor had prescribed the Viagra, but it was "labeled as being issued to the physician rather than Mr. Limbaugh for privacy purposes."
Guess that plan didn’t work out too well. In any event, it’s an odd excuse. Prescriptions aren’t public information anyway. Well, NOW it is.
Rush’s doctor(s) are also in some doo-doo. You simply can’t write a presecription in someone else’s name.
Rush, by the way, was stopped at the airport upon a return trip from the Dominican Republic [raise eyebrows].
UPDATE: From Jesus’ General:
And let’s step into the way-back machine, and take in some quotes from Rushbo himself, on the subject of drugs:
These tough sentencing laws were instituted for a reason. The American people, including liberals, demanded them. Don’t you remember the crack cocaine epidemic? Crack babies and out-of-control murder rates? Liberal judges giving the bad guys slaps on the wrist? Finally we got tough, and the crime rate has been falling ever since, so what’s wrong? —RushLimbaugh.com (8/18/03)
When you strip it all away, Jerry Garcia destroyed his life on drugs. And yet he’s being honored, like some godlike figure. Our priorities are out of whack, folks. —Rush Limbaugh radio show (quoted in the L.A. Times, 8/20/95)
What he’s saying is that if there’s a line of cocaine here, I have to make the choice to go down and sniff it….And his point is that we are rationalizing all this irresponsibility and all the choices people are making and we’re blaming not them, but society for it. All these Hollywood celebrities say the reason they’re weird and bizarre is because they were abused by their parents. So we’re going to pay for that kind of rehab, too, and we shouldn’t. It’s not our responsibility. It’s up to the people who are doing it.–Rush Limbaugh TV show (9/23/93)
I’m appalled at people who simply want to look at all this abhorrent behavior and say, "Hey, you know, we can’t control it anymore. People are going to do drugs anyway. Let’s legalize it." It’s a dumb idea. It’s a rotten idea, and those who are for it are purely, 100 percent selfish.–Rush Limbaugh TV show (12/9/93)