Pubdate: Wed, 20 Jul 2005
Source: Rutland Herald (VT)
Copyright: 2005 Rutland Herald
Contact:  http://www.rutlandherald.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/892
Author: John Tierney, columnist for The New York Times

PUNISHING THE SUFFERERS

ZEPHYRHILLS, Fla. -- When I visited Richard Paey, it quickly became
clear that he posed no menace to society in his new home here, a high-
security Florida state prison near Tampa, where he was serving a 25-
year sentence. The fences, topped with ribbon wire, were more than
enough to keep him from escaping because Paey relies on a wheelchair
to get around.

Paey, who is 46, suffers from multiple sclerosis and chronic pain from
an automobile accident two decades ago. It damaged his spinal cord and
left him with sharp pains in his legs that got worse after a botched
operation. One night he woke up convinced that the room was on fire,
only to realize it was his legs.

"It felt like my legs were in a vat of molten steel," he told me. "I
couldn't move them, and they were burning."

His wife, Linda, an optometrist, supported him and their three
children as he tried to find an alternative to opiates. "At first I
was mad at him for not being able to get better without the
medicines," she said. "But when he's tried every kind of therapy they
suggested and he's still curled up in a ball at night crying from
pain, what else can he do but take more medicine?"

The problem was getting the medicine from doctors who are afraid of
the federal and local crusades against painkillers.

Paey managed to find a doctor willing to give him some relief, but it
was a "vegetative dose," in his wife's words.

"It was enough for him to lay in bed," Linda Paey said. "But if he
tried to sit through dinner or use the computer or go to the kids'
recital, it would set off a crisis, and we'd be in the emergency room.
We kept going back for more medicine because he wasn't getting enough."

As he took more pills, Paey came under surveillance by police officers
who had been monitoring prescriptions. Although they found no evidence
that he'd sold any of the drugs, they raided his home and arrested
him.

What followed was a legal saga pitting Paey against his longtime
doctor (and former friend of the Paeys), who denied giving Paey some
of the prescriptions. Paey said the doctor did give them to him. He
said the doctor had been pressured into testifying against him because
the doctor himself was vulnerable to prosecution for not keeping the
proper records and seeing him often enough.

Paey was convicted of forging prescriptions. He was subject to a 25-
year minimum penalty because he illegally possessed Percocet and other
pills that weighed more than 28 grams, enough to classify him as a
drug trafficker under Florida's draconian law (which treats even a few
dozen pain pills as the equivalent of a large stash of cocaine).

Scott Andringa, the prosecutor in the case, acknowledged that the 25-
year mandatory penalty was harsh, but he said Paey was to blame for
refusing a plea bargain that would have kept him out of jail.

Paey said he had refused the deal partly out of principle -- "I didn't
want to plead guilty to something that I didn't do" -- and partly
because he feared he'd be in pain the rest of his life because doctors
would be afraid to write prescriptions for anyone with a drug conviction.

If you think that sounds paranoid, you haven't talked to other
chronic-pain patients who've become victims of the government
campaigns against prescription drugs. Whether these efforts have done
any good is debatable (and a topic for another column), but the harm
is clear to the millions of patients who aren't getting enough
medicine for their pain.

Paey was merely the most outrageous example of the problem as he spent
his days in prison, lying on a 3-inch foam mattress on a steel bed. He
told me he tried not to do anything to aggravate his condition because
going to the emergency room required an excruciating four-hour trip
sitting in a wheelchair with his arms and legs in chains.

The odd thing, he said, was that he's actually getting better
medication than he did at the time of his arrest because the state of
Florida is now supplying him with a morphine pump, which gives him
more pain relief than the pills that triggered so much suspicion. The
illogic struck him as utterly normal.

"We've become mad in our pursuit of drug-law violations," he said.
"Generations to come will look back and scarcely believe what we've
done to sick people."

John Tierney is a columnist for The New York Times.
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