Rush Limbaugh wasn't alone in being hooked on prescription drugs once upon a time. With celebrity athletes on steroids currently making headlines, we forget that many more ordinary folks are addicted to opiates like OxyContin and Vicodin.

Commentator Natasha Watts focuses on her stomping grounds in eastern Kentucky. Having returned from four years of college, she sees her Appalachian friends and neighbors zonked on pills. The reasons are clear. Coal miners who work in the region are lucky to survive unscathed. Too many miners suffer excruciating injuries, which lead them to pharmacies and to drugs, which make their way into the hands and mouths of countless people of all ages.

Watts describes the enormous cost of this drug epidemic. There's no way that millions of dollars can repay families that have been torn apart, thanks to pill popping. This is certainly not a phenomenon unique to Appalachia and to the twenty-first century. Way back in the 1960s Jacqueline Susann's trashy best-seller, "Valley of the Dolls," portrayed ambitious young women in Hollywood, whose lives were destroyed by barbiturates ("dolls").

The "Summary" that accompanies this piece mentions how drugs are undermining "communities across the country." It may be that pills wreak havoc from Hollywood to Hilton Head. Watts sticks to her knitting in the hills of eastern Kentucky, however -- the "Summary" goes beyond the parameters of her piece.

One tidbit of good news: drug companies are "finally facing penalties" for exacerbating the epidemic, pushing their wares, wooing physicians with sweetheart deals.

If the winter of Watts's discontent is now, can a drug-free Appalachian spring be far behind? One thing is sure: Watts's commentary sheds light on a deep, dark problem, something we could euphemistically call "a humongous challenge."