That was followed quickly by a story in the National Enquirer detailing the accusations of his former housekeeper, Wilma Cline.

Cline — whose husband, David, has a two-decade criminal record including several drug-trafficking charges — said she provided Limbaugh with black-market Lorcet, OxyContin and hydrocone between 1998 and 2002.

All three drugs are synthetic opiates, chemical cousins of morphine and heroin, and highly addictive.

Cline said Limbaugh gave her cigar boxes full of money to pay for the drugs, sometimes as many as 4,000 pills in a seven-week period.

The relationship between taking Lorcet and losing one's hearing is established, but no one but Limbaugh's doctors knows for sure about him. (If he told them about his drug abuse.)

Since Limbaugh continued using the illicit drugs after his hearing loss, it is logical to conclude he considered deafness an acceptable trade-off for the pleasure of using the drugs. This is not an isolated phenomenon, of course. Any user of drugs proven to be harmful, from cigarettes to heroin, sacrifices part of his or her health. A lung here, a liver there, some deafness, an amputation if the steroids backfire. Misery between bouts of transport.

It seems to me there a kind of cost/benefit analysis occuring among addicts. They may decide the pleasure is worth the pain. If they do, that could explain why rehabilitation usually fails. The public health system, on the other hand, assumes the pain of addiction, and the upheaval it causes, is not worth the pleasure. Perhaps this dichotomy is the key to deciding what to do about the millions of drug addicts in America. It suggests the current one-size-fits-all assumption, that every addict really wants to quit, is not accurate. Until the relationship between addiction and hedonism is more thoroughly investigated, we will not know how the monies allocated to drug education and treatment can be spent most usefully.

Note: My blog is Mac-a-ro-nies.