John Tierney has probably one of the most important reads to appear in the NY Times in a good long while:
When I visited Richard 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.
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, 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. 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).
Scott 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.
And this is going on all over America, every day. Every week, your government, in their our idiotic War on Drugs, locks up more doctors, more chronic pain sufferers, and makes criminals out of folks who just want to stop hurting and the Doctors who try to help them.
Radley Balko has been doing yeoman’s work documenting the obscenities, and you really should make his site a regular stop. And you should do what you can to end this immoral, pointless, and evil war on pain sufferers and their caregivers.
More here from Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise, guest blogging at the Washington Monthly.
Tim F
So if Tierney, representing the fringe right, is against this nonsense and us hysterical screaming libs are against it and grumpy moderates like Cole are against it, you wonder who exactly we’re arguing against.
Mr Furious
Mandatory drug sentencing is complete bullshit. Lay it all at the doorstep of politicians looking to appear tough on crime.
Republicans are in the driver’s seat on this now, and any Democrat would be afraid to endorse dropping them for fear of the Republican Wilie Horton response ad. It’s bad news all around. If these jackasses could call a timeout and come up with a bipartisan solution to anything, getting rid of this travesty would be towards the top of my list.
DougJ
There’s another cure for chronic pain that Mr. Paey should have tried. It’s free, it has no side effects, and people have been using it for at least two thousand years to help deal with pain. It’s called prayer.
metalgrid
It will get much worse before it will get any better.
Reid
It’s having a real trickle down effect. My wife just dumped a gastro doctor who’d, in essence, accused her of going to another doctor just to get drugs when she mentioned a doctor’s name he hadn’t heard before. She informed him it was her GP, who’d she’d be seeing for 20 years.
The DEA has the doctors running scared. There’s a lot of Americans suffering the level of pain Mr. Paey is, unable to get a doctor’s help. The fact Mr. Paey ended up in jail says a lot about our society. As does the fact he claims he’s now getting better/stronger pain medication in jail than he was able to as a private citizen.
Tim F
Oxycontin has seriously pathologized pain treatment as well, probably much more so even than ordinary opiates. Pharmacies have completely had to change the way they operate in some parts of the country because of rampant fraud and robberies. We know that the DEA has its hands full tracking down Oxy cases; it’s possible that anybody with an abnormally high but legitimate need for painkillers gets the priviledge of living under a huge red flag.
Prudence Goodwife
The war on prescription pills is terrible. Let’s pray they end it in time for Rush’s trial, although Mr. Paey sounds like a very nice cell mate.
Dave Straub
Dadgummit, I really want to read the comments to Lindsay Beyerstein’s WaMo post, as she’s a very steadfast leftwinger commenting favorably on a Tierney column, but the site went down again.
Balko and Cole are neck-and-neck for estimation as the best blogger out there. I also heartily recommend Radley’s great side project, Spurlock Watch.
Dave Straub
That’s *my* estimation, above. YMMV.
Sherard
Every single facet of the “Drug War” accounts for easily the most money ever wasted on something so completely 1) ineffective, and 2) destructive in history.
It’s an embarassment.
waddayaknow
And the RushMeister gets the ACLU to cover his butt. Where was the ACLU for Richard Paey, who will have a continued need for such meds until he passes from this world. Perhaps it is fitting that the state of Florida now has assumed the cost of his housing and medical treatment.
ppGaz
The “War on Drugs” is and always has been a scam, and a power grab by government. It’s efficacy is questionable. Its methods are worse than questionable. Its effects are abusive. It’s a classic case of two wrongs not making a right. Drub abuse is a problem, but that’s not an adequate reason to create an abusive “war” on the problem.
I have never been able to understand how people who call themselves “conservatives” and rant against big government, turn around and opt for big government to solve the first hard problem that annoys them. The War on Drugs being an egregious example.
Also, I don’t think its honest to talk about the War on Drugs without nodding to the evidence that its application and enforcement is heavily weighted against minorities. To pretend that this is not true, and not wrong, is a huge mistake.
Over-criminalization of the “industry” (and, it is an industry) is neither effective nor the right use of government power. A lot of it is just an excuse to beat up on people that other people don’t like.
It’s a little like the hate-crime issue: Do you need an extra law against hate-murder when you already have a law against murder? Do you need an extra set of laws to bash potential burglars (drug users, say) when you already have plenty of laws against burglary? I tend to look at it that way.
We can buy drug addicts their drugs and put them up in hotels for less than it costs to wage a war on drugs and put drug users in prison. Not only is the WOD stupid, it isn’t even cost-effective AFAIC.
But hey … it’s still a better investment than the even stupider and more costly War on Terror.
Longshot
Peter McWilliams died for our sins.
Emma Zahn
Are there other crimes for which property is automatically confiscated? There was a story in our local paper recently about the local sheriff opening a bank account for confiscated money because he wasn’t comfortable having that much cash in the custody room.
It made me wonder how much the WOD pads small law enforcement budgets. Anybody know?
Don
I think we’re also reaping the results of our unwillingness to spend money on things where the payoff is more than one level of seperation from the expense. We use a treat-the-sympton approach to crime that we’d never tolerate in our personal health care – prevention is too nebulous for us to stomach. Why treat an addict rather than jail him? Why cut demand rather than punish suppliers?
Personally I suspect things in this middle ground “midnight basketball” kind of area would be cheaper for us as a society and wish we would stop shouting them down as unfair and instead demand their supporters prove which ones work.