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My stepdad insists that no doctor would prescribe enough drugs that someone could get addicted to them.

Oxycontin is said to be extremely addictive. Lots of people become addicted due to being prescribed Oxycontin by good doctors, apparently. I think there's a calculated risk in prescribing something like that. On one hand they can work very well; on the other hand, there is a chance of addiction.

I imagine that great wealth can be a bad thing in a situation like this. Money to acquire the drugs was not an issue.

I may be mistaken, but I don't believe that it has been established as fact exactly how Rush acquired the drugs. As far as I know, the only thing that has been said about it has been a National Enquirer article reporting the maid's story.

As to how he acquired them, I will wait until the facts come out before I either believe that he bought them on the black market or through prescriptions.

My stepdad insists that no doctor would prescribe enough drugs that someone could get addicted to them.

You have to remember that unlike most other prescription medications, pain pills act differently on people suffering from actual pain than they do on people suffering no pain that are simply taking them to get high. Someone with severe, continual physical pain can take enough Oxycontin to KILL an average person, and not even feel the least bit lightheaded, much less stoned; he/she will simply have their pain alleviated. Not only that, but they also won't get addicted; if for some reason their pain simply stops one day and they stop their megadose of Oxy cold turkey, they'll be just fune.

By comparison, someone in no pain at all can have quite a fun ride on just one or two low-dose Oxycontins, especially if they break the tablets up first and destroy the time-release capsules so that they get the full hit all at once. (I'm just using Oxy as an example; the same is generally true for all narcotic/addictive pain medications.)

The problem is that there is a vast middle ground between those two extremes. If you have pain - even a LOT of pain - but still end up being prescribed more of the given medication than is actually needed to stop the pain impulses in your own body, then you're going to end up getting the pain relief AND the high. Nowhere near as much of a high as if you had no pain at all, of course, but you'll still feel it ... and start developing the addiction. (Rush admits this is what happened to him: It's not that he didn't need Oxy, but he got too much of it, and he liked it.) And, of course, it's kind of hard to perfectly nail the EXACT amount of medication a patient will need without going overboard, especially when going overboard a bit is something the patient is going to end up enjoying just fine nine times out of ten. It's especially hard for a patient like Rush, whose pain is chronic but variable depending on his situation. (The pain in his back will be different and last a different amount of time if he's going to be traveling in an airplane all weekend, say, than if he just stays at home and plays golf.)

So alnick is right: It is a calculated risk. The patient also takes a calculated risk in such cases, in that he/she may be unlucky enough to get a doctor perfectly willing to prescribe the necessary medication in the first place, but who will cut the patient off more or less arbitrarily in order to cover the his own ass if he thinks the DEA's about to come sniffing around looking for their quota of "pill-happy doctors". Is this what happened to Rush? Who knows...