Quote:

---

April 19, 2004
25 Years for Being 'Stubborn'
Last week Richard Paey, a Florida man who suffers from terrible back pain as a result of a car accident and unsuccessful surgery, received a 25-year mandatory minimum sentence for drug trafficking. After moving from New Jersey to Florida 10 years ago, Paey could not find a local doctor willing to prescribe the large amounts of opioids he needed to relieve his pain, so he started filling out blank prescription forms he obtained from his New Jersey doctor. Although these prescriptions led to drug trafficking charges, there is no evidence that Paey used the drugs for anything other than his own pain relief.

"I kept waiting to hear that he was selling them somehow," one juror who regrets voting to convict told the St. Petersburg Times. "If he was selling them, that's one thing. But he was eating them." The fact that prosecutors at one point offered a Paey a plea agreement involving house arrest and probation (a far cry from 25 years in prison) suggests they knew he was not a drug trafficker.

An editorial in the St. Petersburg Times that condemned the government's unjust treatment of Paey also faulted him for "stubbornly" refusing the proposed plea agreement. The paper's story about Paey's sentence likewise described him as "stubborn." But Paey, who uses a wheelchair to get around and is receiving morphine through a pump while in jail, refuses to identify himself as a criminal merely for doing what he had to do to obtain the medication he needed. "I hope never to hear the word 'stubborn' used to describe Richard Paey again," says Siobhan Reynolds of the Pain Relief Network. "He is a principled and courageous man who has sacrificed himself to demonstrate the hidden and denied reality facing patients in pain."

---

Quote:

---

From painkillers to prison
A Times Editorial
Published April 5, 2004

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When the issue of chronic pain intersects with this nation's draconian drug laws, common sense and compassion often take a holiday. Consider the case of Richard Paey, a 45-year-old father of three who sits in a wheelchair, debilitated by multiple sclerosis and chronic pain from botched back surgery, and is now facing a 25-year mandatory minimum sentence for having forged prescriptions to treat his pain.

Paey's case is just one example of the skewed priorities that result from the nation's drug war: Mandatory minimums tie the hands of judges to offer leniency; and the looming threat of prosecution dissuades doctors from aggressively treating pain.

Paey and his wife moved to Florida from New Jersey in 1994. Earlier, a car accident and disastrous back surgery had left him in debilitating pain, putting him on disability. Paey claimed he couldn't find a local doctor to treat him and so his New Jersey physician sent him undated but signed prescriptions for Percocet, Lortab and Valium.

In January 1997, investigators from the Drug Enforcement Administration met with Paey's New Jersey doctor about the illegal prescriptions. When that source dried up, the government says Paey filled old prescriptions he had photocopied. Despite months-long surveillance of Paey's activities, there was never any evidence that he resold the 1,200 painkillers he bought between January and March. It was all apparently for his personal use.

Still, in 1997 he was charged with drug trafficking, among other drug-related crimes.

To the credit of Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney Bernie McCabe, Paey was offered a generous plea deal of house-arrest and probation, but he stubbornly refused it. Later plea offers for a five-year prison sentence were also rejected. Paey didn't feel that medicating his pain should have been a crime.

And he has a point. While altering a prescription is certainly a criminal act, the under-treatment of pain has been a long-running health care problem in this country, now exacerbated by the increased recreational use of prescription medications such as OxyContin. As the DEA and other law enforcement agencies have stepped up their scrutiny of doctors, many have been frightened away from offering their patients aggressive pain treatment.

The result has been making drug traffickers out of patients who doctor shop and engage in other unlawful practices to get sufficient quantities of painkillers. This is an abuse of our criminal justice resources. Paey is not a man who belongs in prison. What he and other pain patients need is a health care system that will respond to their affliction. (Paey now has a morphine pump in his back to dull the pain. His wife says, ironically, it provides him with more narcotics than he was getting from the Percocet, which is 98.5 percent Tylenol.)

But it looks like prison is very much on the horizon. After two trials were set aside due to irregularities, Paey was convicted by a New Port Richey jury last month in a third. He was found guilty of 15 counts of drug trafficking, obtaining a controlled substance by fraud and possession of controlled substances. He faces multiple 25-year mandatory minimum sentences, since Florida's rigid drug laws treat everyone with a certain amount of medicine like a drug dealer. Sentencing is April 16.

Plenty of blame can be spread around for this travesty, including to Paey himself for not taking the initial plea offer, but the drug laws are the main problem. Mandatory minimum sentencing laws result in breathtaking injustices and remain in place because lawmakers refuse to act rationally where drug issues are involved. With the law stripping Florida's judges of discretion, Paey's only hope is another generous plea offer. Otherwise, this man of failing health will probably spend the rest of his years behind bars.

---

Quote:

---

Florida Pain Patient Sentenced to 25 Years
4/23/04
A wheelchair-bound Richard Paey was sentenced to 25 years in prison by a Florida judge on April 16. Paey, who was convicted of forging prescriptions for pills to ease chronic, severe back pain dating from failed surgeries after an auto accident in 1985, was sentenced under Florida law as a drug dealer -- though even prosecutors conceded there is no evidence he did anything other than consume the medicine himself (http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/332/paey.shtml).

Paey's sentencing came as Florida endures a bout of prescription pain pill abuse hysteria, marked by the continuing legal and media odyssey of an Oxycontin-gobbling Rush Limbaugh and a sensational series of ill-reported stories in the Orlando Sentinel (http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v04/n318/a09.html). Taking full advantage of the media frenzy is the Florida drug control establishment, led by Citrus State "drug czar" James McDonough, head of the governor's Office of Drug Control. Since last fall, McDonough and Florida Republican legislators have been pressing a bill that would enact a prescription monitoring system, and that bill is now near passage.

Richard Paey is a desperately sick man who took desperate measures to ease his pain: Florida police and DEA agents who followed him for months described him wheeling himself into one pharmacy after another and leaving clutching his bags of pain pills. But that didn't matter to prosecutors who tried him as a drug trafficker three times before they could win a conviction that would send him to prison for years.

"It's unfortunate that anybody has to go to prison, but he's got no one to blame but Richard Paey," Assistant State Attorney Mike Halkitis told the St. Petersburg Times after sentencing. "Even if he possessed one pill illegally, it's a crime. All we wanted to do was get him help and get him treated to ensure that he's not doing anything criminal," he added.

Paey and prosecutors wrestled over possible plea bargains as the third trial neared, but Paey ultimately decided to reject a deal that would require him to plead guilty to a crime. He simply didn't believe he was anything other than a victim of a medical system hijacked by the imperatives of the war on drugs.

It was a gamble that almost paid off. One juror, Dwayne Hillis, told the Times he did not want to vote to convict Paey, but relented after he was assured by the jury foreman that Paey would receive probation. "It's my fault," said Hillis, a 42-year-old landscaper from Hudson. "Basically I should have stuck it out."

Hillis was misinformed by the foreman. Paey was convicted of "trafficking" in more than 28 grams -- less than one 100-pill prescription -- of Percocet, a medicine containing 1.5% oxycodone. Under Florida law, he faced a mandatory minimum 25-year prison sentence and $500,000 fine.

"They compromised," Paey said after the verdict, "and in the field of justice, compromises lead to horrible injustice."

"I said, "Guilty. Put it on the (verdict). I hope you all can live with yourselves,'" Hillis recalled. "I just hate myself for what I did."

At the hearing, sentencing Circuit Judge Daniel Diskey expressed dismay at having to impose the harsh sentence, but ultimately washed his hands of the matter. Responding to a comment from a Paey defense attorney that the legislature needed to change the law, Judge Diskey said, "You read my mind. In 22 years of practicing law... I have watched the trial court's discretion in sentencing eroding away." Legislative guidelines have "virtually eliminated judicial discretion," he added. But Judge Diskey ultimately played his appointed role. "It should come as no surprise that I am going to follow the law," he said just before imposing sentence.

"Look what happens when prosecutors know that the defendant was a patient in pain and had no intent to sell the medicines. This madness must be stopped," said Siobhan Reynolds, head of the Pain Relief Network (http://www.painreliefnetwork.org), a group supporting the right of pain patients and the physicians who prescribe for them to be treated with dignity and compassion. "Richard V. Paey has been a victim of advanced multiple sclerosis and a botched back surgery, and on April 16, Paey became another victim of overzealous prosecution of pain patients and mandatory minimums," said Reynolds, who attended the sentencing.

"Paey, in his wheelchair with a morphine pump sewn into his ruined back, will live out what for him is a death sentence in a Florida prison for possessing the medicine that he requires to survive," Reynolds noted. "He needs air conditioning in order to survive the summer, but Florida's prison system does not provide it. This is an absolute travesty."

Two weeks ago, Paey's wife Linda told Drug War Chronicle she expected him to serve less than a year before winning on appeal. Now, if he can only hold out that long.

---