Punishing Pain

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Punishing Pain

By JOHN TIERNEY

Published: July 19, 2005

Zephyrhills, Fla.

When I visited Paey here, it quickly became clear that he posed

no menace to society in his new home, a high-security Florida state

prison near Tampa, where he was serving a 25-year sentence. The fences,

topped with razor wire, were more than enough to keep him from escaping

because Mr. Paey relies on a wheelchair to get around.

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Mr. 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.

" 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, , 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. Mr. 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, " Mrs. 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, Mr. Paey came under surveillance by police

officers who had been monitoring the 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 Mr. Paey against his longtime

doctor (and a former friend of the Paeys), who denied at the trial that

he had given Mr. Paey some of the prescriptions. Mr. Paey maintains

that the doctor did approve the disputed prescriptions, and several

pharmacists backed him up at the trial. Mr. Paey was convicted of

forging prescriptions.

He was subject to a 25-year minimum penalty because he illegally

possessed Percocet and other pills weighing 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).

Andringa, the prosecutor in the case, acknowledged that the

25-year mandatory penalty was harsh, but he said Mr. Paey was to blame

for refusing a plea bargain that would have kept him out of jail.

Mr. 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.

Mr. Paey is merely the most outrageous example of the problem as he

contemplates spending the rest of his life on a three-inch foam

mattress on a steel prison 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, is 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. "

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