This archive is not an exhaustive, but comprehensive collection of newspaper, television and social media on the Richard Paey Case. It is presented anew, to illustrate how a drug war injustice story doesn't begin with major media. It begins with people like you. From local advocacy to regional papers, news of injustices goes on to newspapers like the New York Times, and TV shows like 60 Minutes.

Since his release and pardon, Richard's story continues to be used to illustrate the inhumanity and waste that is our US War on Drugs. In 2010, Richard's case was featured on a Criminal Justice themed Penn & Teller on Showtime. Scroll through the links above for details on each news feature.

Brought to you by Parallel Universe, the War on Drugs is a film documentary that reveals the destruction of past and current drug policy. The film features Richard Paey and Sharanda Jones cases, and is available free, and online here.

November Coalition (US)

Report: Richard Paey Is Free!

By John Chase, November Coalition


Richard Paey is finally back home tonight after 3.5 years in prison.

I want to thank everyone for letters, phone calls, faxes, emails to Governor Crist and the Florida Clemency Board. We know for a fact that Crist alone received 50 letters.

Please know that such communications have a HUGE impact.

I attended the meeting in Tallahassee Thursday morning. My notes on the meeting are appended below as text.


Tallahassee, FL: 20 Sept 2007

Richard Paey's petition for sentence commutation was first on the agenda of the Sept 20th quarterly meeting of Florida's Clemency Board in the Capitol in Tallahassee. The meeting began at 9AM.

There were 83 petitioners, including 45 for restoration of civil rights and 31 for pardons. The room was packed with petitioners, their families, friends, and some lawyers. The Parole Board had recommended against Richard Paey's petition for sentence commutation.

Although Richard's petition was for commutation, Governor Crist granted a full pardon upon hearing the Paey family speak, before asking other members of the Clemency Board for comment.

Although "clemency" suggests the petitioner is remorseful and has been rehabilitated, Linda's lawyer, John Flannery, took a hard line. He said the prosecution was wrong from the start, that Richard was trying to treat his pain only because no medical professional would help him. He spoke to educate the Board and the audience that opiates do not do what people think they do.

He mentioned, for instance, that he'd talked to Richard the night before and found him to be lucid and rational even though he receives massive doses of morphine from his implanted pump. He spoke for about 15 minutes.

Then Linda, her 3 teenagers and one co-worker, spoke. It was a highly emotional moment. After Crist's ruling, and comments by other Board members, the room erupted into thunderous applause, even though they had sat almost 30 minutes waiting to be heard themselves.

Linda's entourage, smiling, laughing, crying, filed out into the hallway so others could present their own cases to the Clemency Board. In the hallway the family was mobbed by reporters and photographers.

As the interviews wound down, John Flannery was arranging for Linda to drive to the prison near Daytona Beach to pick him up. One thing she wanted to do first was to buy non-heeled shoes to make sure the prison lets her in. A nearby Capitol security guard told her where to buy them.

Tonight's news reports say Richard Paey is back home in Hudson, Florida. Finally, finally, after more than 3 years in prison, and 10 years total struggling against Florida's criminal justice system.

After Crist spoke out to grant Richard's pardon, Charles Bronson (Secretary of Agriculture) spoke in agreement and mentioned that police are put in a difficult position, considering what the law says.

Bill McCollum (Attorney General) agreed that the problem is the law. Alex Sink (Chief Financial Officer) didn't comment. Even McCollum came on board when Crist took a vote. It was 4 - 0.

John Chase
Palm Harbor, FL

St. Petersburg Times (FL)

Paey Given Full Pardon; Crist Orders Him Freed Today

Gov. Charlie Crist And The Florida Cabinet Voted Unanimously To Grant Paey A Full Pardon Thursday Morning For His 2004 Conviction On Drug Trafficking And Possession Charges

Return to Drug War News: Don't Miss Archive

TALLAHASSEE -- Richard Paey is a chronic pain patient in year three of a 25-year mandatory-minimum sentence for trafficking in drugs -- his own pain medication.

But his freedom is just hours away.

Gov. Charlie Crist and the Florida Cabinet voted unanimously to grant Paey a full pardon Thursday morning for his 2004 conviction on drug trafficking and possession charges.

"We aim to right a wrong and exercise compassion and to do it with grace," the governor said. "Congratulations ... and I state he should be released today."

With that, Paey's wife Linda, their three children, a family friend and attorney John Flannery II hugged and cried at the podium, the entire cabinet meeting room erupting into applause at 9:40 a.m.

It was a stunning turn in the long saga of Paey, a 48-year-old Hudson man who suffers debilitating pain from a 1985 car wreck, botched back surgery and multiple sclerosis that has left him needing the use of a wheelchair in prison.

He was first arrested in 1997 and convicted on the third try in 2004 of possessing, trafficking and illegally obtaining the medication he needs for the searing, fiery pain in his back and legs.

His supporters still contest every bit of the state's case and today, they finally found sympathetic ears eager to help. His medical condition is real, they told the cabinet, evidenced by the amoung of painkillers the Department of Corrections itself now gives to Richard Paey every day.

What makes Thursday's development all the more surprising was that the Florida Parole Commission actually recommended against commuting Paey's sentence to time served.

But then Crist allowed Flannery to speak for nearly 30 minutes -- much more than the 5-minute limit. Then the governor allowed Linday Paey, their three children and even a family friend to speak.

After their emotional presentation, the first comments from the dias came from the governor: "I want to move that we grant a full pardon." All three cabinet members agreed.

The family had never hoped for a full pardon or even thought to ask. It was just the start of a day of surprises for Linda Paey and her children.

"I grabbed Jonh's hand, we came into this so scared, trembling," she said. "I was so fearful when I heard the parole commission did not support his application.

"It was a complete shock," she said of Crist's recommending a full pardon and ordering her husband's release today. "I didn't know you could do that."

She didn't even know how she would get the news to her husband at Tomoka Correctional Institution in Daytona Beach: "He'll be shocked. We're all shocked."

After the cameras left, tears quickly turned to laughter in the atrium outside as the family spoke about having their father back in their lives.

Flannery, the family and a state official huddled to discuss the logistics of freeing Richard Paey and driving down to Daytona Beach to pick him up today and take him home to Pasco County.

Miami Herald (FL)

Pain Sufferer Wins Pardon In Drug Case

By Marc Caputo

Return to Drug War News: Don't Miss Archive

TALLAHASSEE -- Richard Paey, a victim in the war on drugs, was granted a full, immediate and unexpected pardon by Gov. Charlie Crist and the Cabinet Thursday morning, allowing him to get out of prison and be reunited with his family later in the day.

Paey, 49, has spent the last 3 years in prison after he was convicted on drug trafficking charges in a 1997 arrest for filling out fake prescriptions and possessing about 700 Percocet narcotic painkillers.

He was to be imprisoned for 25 years.

The catch: Everyone, including judges, acknowledged the traffic accident victim was using the pills for debilitating pain. Since his incarceration, prison doctors have hooked him up to a morphine drip, which delivers more pain medication daily than he was convicted of trafficking.

The state's parole commission recommended denying clemency for Paey, who was only seeking to have his prison sentence commuted.

But after his lawyer, wife and four children wept and pleaded for Paey's release, Crist and the Cabinet went further than Paey expected by unanimously agreeing to grant him a full pardon-meaning he'll have the right to vote and carry firearms.

They also acknowledged that the state's drug laws might be unfair.

"This is not a pleasant case," said Attorney General Bill McCollum, who noted that he supported mandatory-minimum sentences when he was in Congress.

"Our laws are very much to blame."

But so are the prosecutors in Pasco County, said Paey's wife, Linda Paey, who said she couldn't understand why they zealously pursued her husband through three trials despite the widespread acknowledgement that he was a pain victim and not a drug dealer.

"I've changed. I no longer trust the police. I don't trust the justice system," she said. "Only the media got our case right."

Crist, too, took a swipe at the prosecutors, saying the war on drugs itself isn't just to blame in cases such as this.

"If they're prosecuted appropriately, then justice will be done," he said.

"Obviously, this case cries out for a review of that process."

Tampa Tribune (FL)

Disabled Man's Justice May Be Served Cold

By Daniel Ruth

To pass the time in prison, and Richard Paey certainly has nothing but time, the man the Pasco County Sheriff's Office tried to suggest was the Carlos Lehder of Oxycodone uses domino pieces to laboriously sculpt tiny works of art.

But if there is any fairness in this insane case of prosecutors gone bonkers, with a little bit of luck and a whole lot of justice, come Sept. 20, it's possible the last tile will drop in Richard Paey's favor.

Since May 2004, the 48-year-old Paey has been an inmate in the Florida prison system, serving a 25-year term after his conviction on seven counts of drug trafficking, possession and obtaining a controlled substance by fraud.

And it's all first-degree balderdash.

Paey's legal nightmare began in 1997 when Pasco County Sheriff's Office sleuths, vying perhaps for the Barney Fife Lifetime Achievement Award, raided the lawyer's home and discovered stockpiles of painkillers such as Percocet, Vicodin and the aforementioned Oxycodone.

A Clue?

Paey insisted the drugs were for his own personal use and had been legally obtained by prescription from his New Jersey doctor.

Indeed, had the sheriff's gumshoes looked just a pinch closer at Paey, they would have found a man in a wheelchair as a result of horrific back injuries suffered in a car accident, who was also suffering from multiple sclerosis.

Somehow those clues managed to elude the eagle-eyed Sherlock Holmes-like detectives.

In what seemed like a good idea at the time, Paey, taking the radical position that he was innocent, declined various plea offers that would have resulted in little or no jail time.

And in fact, at trial, no evidence was presented linking Paey to any sale and/or distribution of drugs.

Nor did prosecutors provide any proof Paey forged prescriptions.

Yet in a miscarriage of justice that has to qualify as the Dreyfus affair of Pasco County, Paey was still found guilty.

And for irritating the court by rejecting the plea deals, a handicapped man who is less of a threat to society than Bess Truman found himself off to the hoosegow, for all practical purposes, for the rest of his life.

Righting A Wrong

And the Paey debacle only grew more bizarre.

This year, the Second District Court of Appeals, in grudgingly upholding the technically legal conviction of the defendant, also agreed, "Mr. Paey's argument about his sentence does not fall on deaf ears, but it falls on the wrong ears," urging the Clemency Board to right the moral wrong of this case.

According to Paey's attorney, John P. Flannery II of Leesburg, Va., petitioners seeking a pardon or clemency must serve at least a third of their sentence before their cases can be heard by the board, which is made up of Gov. Charlie Crist, Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, Attorney General Bill McCollum and Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson.

But a few days ago, Paey was notified by the Office of Executive Clemency that he had been granted a waiver to have his plea for mercy be heard at the board's next scheduled meeting, Sept. 20.

Flannery regarded the development as "most encouraging. Now we do what's most difficult: we wait and pray."

It's about time a chip fell in Richard Paey's favor.

St. Petersburg Times (FL)

Clemency Hopes Pinned On Crist

A Man In Prison For Illegally Obtaining Pain Drugs Clears A Hurdle In His Fight For Freedom.

By Jamal Thalji


Richard Paey, 48, is in state prison for convictions related to buying drugs illegally to treat pain he says he has had since a 1985 car crash.

Richard Paey wants out of prison. He's serving 25 years for illegally obtaining the medication he said he needs for chronic pain. He turned down a lighter sentence because he doesn't think he did anything wrong.

His plight, his stand on principle, has earned him sympathy from across the nation.

But not much help. Not until recently.

Now the Hudson man has cleared a major hurdle in what his lawyer calls his "last real hope" for freedom: clemency.

The Florida Parole Commission recommended that Gov. Charlie Crist waive a key rule so the state's chief executive can consider whether to end Paey's days in prison.

That bureaucratic development is the first bit of good, concrete news Paey, 48, has heard since his plight began.

"It's been a very difficult process, " said Paey's attorney, John Flannery II of Virginia. "This is the first positive action that's been helpful."

Pasco deputies and federal agents arrested Paey in 1997 after he bought 1, 200 painkillers with fake prescriptions.

Three years ago, a Pasco jury reluctantly convicted the father of three for a host of drug charges: possessing them, trafficking in them and obtaining them by fraud. The judge reluctantly sent Paey to prison to serve the mandatory sentence.

Paey said he needs the drugs for debilitating pain, the result of a 1985 car crash, failed surgeries and multiple sclerosis that left him needing a wheelchair.

In December, an appellate court refused to overturn his conviction and sentence. But those judges offered a glimmer of hope by acknowledging his plight.

While the courts did not have the power to act, the judges wrote, Paey could ask the governor for help.

He did just that, petitioning Crist for clemency. In the meantime, the Florida Supreme Court refused in March to hear an appeal in Paey's case.

Paey considered an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. But then the Florida Parole Commission's recommendation arrived June 7 -- the deadline for Paey to appeal to the nation's highest court.

"We thought if we did that it would discourage the clemency process, " Flannery said, "and we wanted to show our faith in the clemency process."

Which means clemency is Paey's last realistic hope for getting out of prison.

It takes the governor and two cabinet members on Florida's clemency board to make a decision. They could commute Paey's sentence to time served, or reduce it from the original 25 years.

Crist has until September to decide whether to grant the waiver and bring Paey's petition before the board.

Normally a petitioner must have served at least a third of his sentence before he can apply for clemency. But a waiver can be granted to consider the case earlier if the appeal "demonstrates extraordinary merit."

The Florida Parole Commission recommended such a waiver in Paey's case.

If Crist does not grant Paey's waiver within the 90-day time limit, the appeal is denied.

In that case, Flannery believes his client will have to wait until he's served a third of his sentence - about eight years, or until 2012 - before Paey can ask for clemency again.

"The governor's clemency power is a power of grace ..., " the lawyer said. "We hope he'll decide not only to commute Richard's sentence, but that the time he's served is sufficient punishment for anything he may have done."

CBS - 60 Minutes

Prisoner Of Pain
How One Man's Quest For Pain Relief Landed Him In Jail

By Daniel Schorn

(CBS) Treatment for chronic pain remains one of those medical mysteries. Each of us deals with it differently. One person's minor ache is another's agony. The main relief comes from a variety of drugs that are often abused by addicts and have their own international black market.

As a result, in this country, doctors tend to under-prescribe painkillers because of their addictive nature and for fear of attracting the attention of authorities. Their patients are also often under suspicion when they try to alleviate unrelenting pain — when they become prisoners of pain.

Correspondent Morley Safer reports the story of one man's ordeal.

At the Tomoka Hills maximum security prison just outside of Daytona Beach, Fla., barbed wire and constant surveillance are meant to keep its hard cases from escaping. But there’s at least one inmate who poses no such threat.

Richard Paey is in a wheelchair because of a severe spinal injury. Without constant medication he is in excruciating pain. It was pain that put him on the path to prison.

"I felt like my legs were being dipped into a furnace," says Paey. "They were burning, and I couldn't move them. It's an intense pain that, over time, will literally drive you to suicide."

Paey says he tried to kill himself twice. "And for me, death would have been a form of relief."

Pain-killing drugs were his salvation but pain-killing drugs put him behind bars for drug trafficking.

How did this Ivy League-educated lawyer and 47-year-old father of three end up as a convicted drug trafficker? Read more and see the entire 60 Minutes interview here.

The Charlotte Observer

Prisoner Of Pain Becomes Martyr Of Drug War

Now State Pays For The Medication He Was Convicted For Obtaining

Charlotte Observer, (NC)

By Radley Balko, policy analyst at the Cato Institute


Today, Richard Paey sits in a wheelchair behind high walls and razor wire in a high-security prison near Daytona Beach, Fla. Paey is a 46- year-old father of three, and a paraplegic. His condition is the result of a car accident, a botched back surgery and multiple sclerosis -- three setbacks that left him in chronic, debilitating pain. After moving to Florida from New Jersey, Paey found it increasingly difficult to get prescriptions for the pain medication he needed to function normally.

Paey's difficulties finding treatment were in large part due to the federal and state governments' efforts to prevent the illegal use of prescription pain medicine. A doctor today could face fines or suspension, the loss of his license or practice, even prison time and the seizure of his property should drug cops (most of whom have no medical training) decide he's prescribing too many painkillers. As a result, physicians are apprehensive about aggressively treating pain.

Paey went from doctor to doctor, looking for someone to give him the medication he needed. By the time he eventually turned to his old New Jersey doctor for help, he had attracted the attention of Florida drug control authorities. What happened next is in dispute, but it ended with a raid on Paey's home, his arrest, and his eventual conviction on drug distribution charges.

Paey insists his old doctor wrote him the prescriptions he needed. The Florida pharmacists who testified at his trial back him up. But the doctor says Paey forged the prescriptions. Cops gave the doctor a devil's bargain - -- give Paey up, or face 25 years to life imprisonment himself for excessive prescribing of painkillers. Paey maintains the prescriptions were legitimate, but understands why his doctor turned against him.

Why No Legal Access?

The larger issue, of course, is why a man who is clearly not an addict (he wasn't taking the medication to get high) and had a legitimate use for the medication wasn't given access to what he needed in the first place.State prosecutors concede there's no evidence Paey ever sold or gave his medication away. Nevertheless, under draconian drug war statutes, they were permitted to pursue distribution charges against him solely based on the amount of the medication in his possession (the unauthorized possession of as few as 60 tablets of some pain medications can qualify one as a "drug trafficker").

Paey was convicted and put in prison for 25 years. Ironically, the state of Florida now pays for a morphine pump connected to Paey's spine that delivers the same class of medication at the same doses the state of Florida told him wasn't necessary, and put him in prison for trying to obtain.

Prosecutors originally offered Paey a plea bargain that would have helped him avoid jail time, but Paey refused, insisting that (a) he did nothing wrong, and (b) even he had, it shouldn't be a crime to seek relief from chronic pain. Paey feared that a plea would make other doctors in the state more reluctant to treat pain.

Publicly, Paey's prosecutors have conceded that the sentence was excessive, yet they insist that Paey himself is to blame, citing his refusal to accept a plea agreement. The chilling implication: Paey is serving prison time for drug distribution not because he's guilty of actually distributing drugs -- the state admits as much -- but because he insisted on exercising his constitutionally protected right to a jury trial.

No Threat To Anyone

Earlier this year, Paey was moved to a prison facility more than two hours from his wife and family, who live in New Port Richey. He was then moved even farther away, some 170 miles, to the Tomoka Correctional Institution near Daytona Beach.

At about the same time, prison medical staff told Paey that the state refused to give permission for them to refill his morphine pump. For Paey, this was the equivalent of a death sentence. The state let him agonize for weeks before finally authorizing the refill the day before his pump was scheduled to run dry.

Two activist groups -- the Pain Relief Network (www.painreliefnetwork.org) and the November Coalition (www.november.org/cartoons) -- have begun a campaign urging Gov. Jeb Bush to grant Paey a pardon. Paey is not a criminal. He isn't a threat to anyone. He's a tragic figure who has become a political prisoner of America's allegiance to zero tolerance drug prohibition.

Paey should be freed. And Florida lawmakers should pass reforms to ensure that drug war fanaticism doesn't prevent sick people from getting the medication they need.

Radley Balko is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, 1000 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20001.

This story also ran in the National Review

The New York Times

Op-Ed: Punishing Pain


By John Tierney

Zephyrhills, Fla. -- 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.

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."

The Weekly Planet (FL)

Mandatory Madness

What Happened To A Man Whose Only Crime, It Seems, Was Trying To Ease His Chronic Pain

By Eric Snider


"You know when you have a toothache and the pain is so severe that you absolutely have to be seen immediately by a dentist?" says the man in the wheelchair. "Imagine if you had to grin and bear it for an undetermined period of time. You can't see straight. You think you'll pass out, and sometimes you do. And sometimes you pray you will."

Richard Paey, chronic pain patient, is describing how bad his body can hurt. He suffers from what is often called "failed back syndrome," an inoperable condition that has sentenced him to a life of pain that most of us hopefully will never have to comprehend. This is not his only sentence. On March 5, he was convicted of 15 counts of drug trafficking, obtaining a controlled substance by fraud and possession of a controlled substance, which earned him a mandatory minimum of 25 years in state prison and a $500,000 fine.

This is what Richard Paey did -- or, more accurately, this is what a jury found Richard Paey (pronounced "Pay") guilty of: fraudulently obtaining prescriptions of Percocet (which contains the opiate oxycodone) and Lortab (which contains another opiate, hydrocodone), each of which exceeded 28 grams.

That's the magic number, 28 grams. Illegally possessing this amount gets you 25 years. It's the same mandatory minimum as 28 grams of heroin.

Richard Paey is the latest poster boy for advocates of chronic pain patients, who say that this legion of silent sufferers -- from nine to 17 percent of adult Americans, according to studies -- face an ongoing culture clash with the War on Drugs.

It's a war that pain patients are losing. The system is topsy-turvy, pain activists say, giving medically uneducated law enforcement the power to decide how much medicine someone is allowed to possess. Further, they maintain that many doctors who prescribe opiates remain anxious about that knock on the door from the law, and can thus become extremely conservative when treating chronic pain.

The drug war has turned cops into docs and docs into cops. Physicians constantly screen for "drug seekers" by looking for certain behaviors. They have taken to urine-testing and interrogating folks who are desperately trying to alleviate their pain. Pain patients often get under-prescribed or turned away, leaving many of them in unnecessary agony. "There's so much suffering," Paey says. "They need a war on pain."

Richard Paey knows agony. One afternoon last month, his muffled words echoed through the dank visitors room at the Pasco County jail. He spoke to me through thick glass. His once-athletic body, ravaged by nearly two decades of intractable pain and five years of multiple sclerosis, sat hunched into a crude wheelchair. Oval, wire-rim glasses framed his piercing brown eyes. His black hair, medium-length, was unkempt, and his moustache could have used a trim. His skin had that particular kind of pale hue that comes with extended periods of indoor confinement.

Paey's discourse ranged from pensive musings to indignant rants. His hands shook. While awaiting assignment to a prison, he said, he spent 23 hours a day in a bed in a small room with only jail-approved reading material. He didn't know this during the interview, but the next day he'd be transferred to a transitional facility in Orlando where the Florida Department of Corrections would figure out what to do with this most unusual inmate.

Paey is not doing time for just the opiates. Each of his Percocet pills contained 5 mg of oxycodone and 325 mg of acetaminophen (Tylenol). For sentencing purposes, though, the latter substance was weighed in as well. Eighty-five of his pills weighed 28 grams. If Paey were sentenced for just the oxycodone, he would've needed 5,600 Percocet tabs to earn a quarter-century behind bars. From January to March of '97, he bought 1,200 from area pharmacies.

This inflated numbers game is just one perplexing fact in the strange and scary case of Richard Paey, 45, husband and father of three, convict. Consider also that Pasco sheriff's deputies surveilled him for weeks and never found any evidence that he sold a single pill. Yet the state attorney's office charged him with trafficking -- because it could. In Florida, you can be charged with trafficking certain drugs, oxycodone and hydrocodone included, without actually peddling them. You merely need to possess them illegally.

For its part, the State Attorney's Office in Pasco offered Paey several plea deals -- including, early on, house arrest and probation, then shorter prison terms. For various reasons, each deal went south. Some onlookers have characterized Paey as stubborn, saying that he put one foot in a prison cell by not jumping at the state's plea offers. Paey came close to cutting a deal several times, mostly at the urging of his wife, Linda, and his lawyer, but his heart wasn't in it. Paey has maintained all along that he did nothing criminal, that he was only medicating his own severe pain, which required large doses, and that his scripts -- written, faxed and phoned in by a doctor in New Jersey -- were legitimate.

After one mistrial and another guilty verdict vacated by a judge who said Paey had not been competent to stand trial, he was convicted during a third proceeding. The jury was not permitted to know that Paey was facing a stiff mandatory minimum. One juror held out for acquittal but was eventually swayed toward a guilty vote when the jury foreman convinced him that the defendant would get only probation. The judge had no choice but to issue 25 years.

The Paeys have hired high-powered appellate attorney Eli Stutsman of Oregon, while still retaining their regular local counsel, Robert Attridge. They figure that, even if an appeal is successful, Richard Paey will stay locked up for at least a year and a half. The Paey camp also holds out hope for clemency or a pardon from governor Jeb Bush, whose own daughter has experienced drug problems.

"I don't think the [Florida] Legislature had Richard Paey in mind when they set up these minimum mandatory sentences," says Attridge, "The punishment in this particular case in cruel and unusual."

On Feb. 11, 1985, Richard Paey was driving on Philadelphia's pocked and frantic Schuylkill Expressway, on his way to class at the University of Pennsylvania law school, when he got into a wreck that sandwiched his car between two others. He went to the ER the next day. Directly after the accident, Paey began taking sizeable doses of opiate pain relievers. A few months later, he underwent his first back surgery, but that only offered about a year's worth of limited relief.In 1987, he signed on for another operation. Unbeknownst to him, he received a fusion procedure that included an experimental "pedicle screw" implant that had been turned down for approval by the FDA. The implants became the focus of a high-profile class action lawsuit that was covered by the TV show 20/20. Linda Paey said her husband never received a settlement because he got involved after a statute of limitations passed.

His back went from bad to worse. He'd get spasms that would hamper his breathing. The pain was always present, often excruciating. But that didn't prevent Paey from carrying on with life. He finished law school, then did a short stint as a law clerk, but had to quit because, among other limitations, he couldn't lift the hefty law books. He never took the bar exam.

Paey learned that further surgery was not an option, that to remove the screws in his back could cause paralysis. He tried to stay game, but eventually reality sunk in. "You had a young, virile guy thinking that all you need to do is have the will and you can make it happen," Linda Paey says. "The pain, you could control that. He was convinced he could mentally muscle his way through this problem and continue to work. Ultimately, he had to face facts that he just wouldn't be able to do it. Those years were hell."

Paey went on Social Security disability in 1989, his career dreams dashed. The Paeys moved to Columbus, a town in central New Jersey. There he found a doctor, a general practitioner named Stephen Nurkiewicz, who prescribed him ample doses of medication, including opiates such as Percocet and Vicodin.

The two became friendly, and Paey did some small-claims legal work for Nurkiewicz's office. In 1994, the Paeys --- now with three small children -- relocated to Hudson in Pasco County because Richard's father was dying of kidney cancer. Linda Paey, an optometrist, found work in New Port Richey. Richard mostly stayed in bed.

The couple looked for doctors to step in for Nurkiewicz, but encountered a lot of resistance. Staff people would tell the couple that the doctor didn't handle chronic pain patients or that the practice didn't treat people with failed back syndrome. Linda Paey feels that physicians avoided Richard because of his large need for prescription pain meds and his involvement in the experimental back surgery, a potential malpractice suit in waiting.

Dr. Nurkiewicz was sympathetic, say the Paeys, and set up a plan where he would mail prescriptions for Percocet, Lortab and Valium. Some of the scripts were undated; others were faxed and then verified with the pharmacy over the phone. The system worked well for a while -- so well in fact that in 1996 Richard Paey started taking police academy classes at Pasco-Hernando Community College. Nurkiewicz wrote a letter to the school outlining Paey's health status.

Since the time of his botched back surgery, Paey also had tried virtually every conceivable treatment besides opiate drugs, including electronic stimulation, biofeedback, spinal injections, chiropractic, massage, physical therapy and hypnosis. None worked nearly as well as the pills.

'Untreated pain, it'll kill ya," says Siobhan Reynolds, founder/director of the Pain Relief Network, based in New York. Increasingly, pain specialists and advocates characterize chronic pain as its own disease. "If it doesn't get resolved, in time it can become its own malignancy," says Dr. Frank Fisher of northern California. "It can spread and metastasize to other parts of the nervous system and ultimately destroy a person's health."Fisher recently was exonerated of running a pill mill in a rural town 150 miles from Sacramento. Authorities alleged that he indiscriminately wrote scripts for OxyContin (uncut oxycodone) that caused several deaths in the area. The five-year ordeal has left his practice moribund, though, and he still faces possible sanctions from the California medical board.

Chronic pain patients not only face discrimination from law enforcement, but also from society at large. Most of us simply do not understand what protracted, severe pain is like. Many sufferers who spend periods of time untreated (or undertreated) will seriously consider or attempt suicide. (Richard Paey tried twice.)

There's also the highly ingrained notion in our society that pain somehow ennobles us. Call it the grin-and-bear-it ethic. According to several historical accounts, it wasn't all that long ago that late-stage cancer patients were denied opiate drugs so they could more closely feel the pain of Christ on the cross.

Advocates of chronic pain patients see all this as a bunch of hooey; they maintain that with today's technology, there is no reason anyone should suffer unnecessarily.

While most pain docs favor an integrated treatment approach, almost all prescribe opiates, and many think these drugs are the single most effective option. The American Medical Association has dubbed opiates "the gold standard" of pain treatments.

Yet law enforcement and prosecutors -- and the public at large -- remain suspicious of them. One teen who dies of an OxyContin overdose can cause a media shit-storm that further demonizes the drugs.

In 1995, oxycodone and other painkillers were incorporated into Florida's drug trafficking laws, and big-ticket sentences followed.

In a phone interview from his Tallahassee office, James McDonough, director of the Florida Office of Drug Control, declined to comment on the Paey case, saying he wasn't familiar enough with it. He did explain that a proportionately high number of oxycodone deaths in recent years have reinforced the notion that the drug should remain in a class that requires stiff jail terms. (Consider this: If someone is convicted of trafficking in 28 grams of cocaine, Florida statutes call for a mandatory minimum sentence of just three years.)

Pain specialists counter that, yes, certain people are going to abuse prescription drugs, but when used properly they are completely safe. In fact, says Dr. Fisher, "Opioids resemble natural endorphins, which is probably our best natural defense against pain. People have opioids in them naturally. But when chronic pain takes hold, people simply need more of them. [Opiate] pain treatment can be envisioned as supplementation with natural substances, replacement therapy, like insulin for diabetes."

Here's another myth-buster: Chronic pain sufferers do not get a buzz from opiates. "I get no euphoria," Richard Paey says. "I get no mental effects, other than fatigue."

While the science is complicated, doctors essentially say that the effects of the opiates are so concentrated on dulling intense pain that they simply do not have the leftover strength to work on pleasure centers.

And further, the most sophisticated opiate medications are time-released to be effective for up to 12 hours. Sure, addicts can crush and snort them to disable the long-acting capabilities, but junkies aren't using them for physical pain.

"It's ridiculous that these drugs are seen as inherently evil," says Reynolds. "They save people's lives and families. That's more important than the fact that people abuse them; it's just that simple."

Pasco County deputy B.J. Wright got bumped up to detective in '96 and quickly took over the pharmacy beat. He encouraged drug store personnel to contact him if people filled what seemed like excessive prescriptions. Soon enough, Richard Paey popped onto his radar. Here was a guy who couldn't possibly be taking such a volume of pills himself; he had to be selling them, Wright figured. Deputies started watching Paey, and eight times caught him on tape filling scripts of opiate medications -- each of which would later weigh out in excess of 28 grams.

Wright contacted Lisa Loos of the Tampa office of the Drug Enforcement Administration. She in turn called Dr. Nurkiewicz in New Jersey to inquire about his large prescriptions issued to Richard Paey in Florida. The doctor initially told her that Paey was his chronic pain patient who needed the meds.

When Wright and Loos visited Nurkiewicz at his office on March 5, 1997, however, the doctor started backpedaling. He asked if he was under investigation, and the cops matter-of-factly said yes. They also casually informed him that the penalty could run as high as 25 years in prison. Nurkiewicz then denied writing prescriptions after 1996, thus helping build a case against Paey for prescription fraud.

"When the DEA got involved, [Nurkiewicz] started throwing Richard Paey to the wolves," Attridge says. "And it was amazing how the investigators bought every word of it."

Wright still suspected Paey of drug dealing. He and other deputies tailed him and staked out his house over the course of several weeks. Their surveillance revealed nothing.

On March 12, 1997, Richard Paey was in the upstairs bathroom of his home. Linda and the kids were downstairs. His mother, who had been babysitting, prepared to leave. Around 7 p.m., a team of deputies burst into the home with black masks and automatic weapons drawn. Flashing a search warrant, the cops found a modest number of pills, a cache of empty pill bottles, and a bank of computer equipment that they would claim enabled Paey to forge scripts. They discovered letterhead from Dr. Nurkiewicz and other stuff that also suggested forgery. They led Richard Paey from his home in handcuffs. After being released from jail the following day, Paey entered an emergency room with symptoms of a bleeding ulcer.

Ironically, it was during this tense time that Richard Paey received his first truly effective treatment for chronic pain. A doctor surgically implanted a morphine pump that establishes a steady blood level of pain reliever. It was the first time his opiates weren't cut with large doses of Acetaminophen. Paey continued to take periodic pills for episodes of "breakthrough pain," but Linda Paey says he hasn't taken oral meds for a couple of years now.

Prosecutors estimated that Richard Paey filled prescriptions for 18,000 pills over a two-year period. Shocking, huh? Paey's accusers assumed that taking that much medicine would cause serious illness or death.Not likely, say pain doctors. If Paey took Percocet as directed for chronic pain -- two every four hours -- it would add up to 8,760 over two years. Add in doses of Lortab and Valium and it's easy to understand how Paey could eat 18,000 pills in two years.

The larger issue, Paey's backers say, is that cops and prosecutors got to decide at all. "We're asking prosecutors instead of doctors," says Dr. Alex DeLuca, a former pain specialist in New York, now a writer and advocate. "Where do they get the answers? 'Sounds like too many pills to me,'" he adds with a laugh.

Says Dr. Fisher of California: "If you use the concept of titration, where the doses are raised to the point that the patient functions optimally, then law enforcement standards can decide it's too much. You have conflicting ideologies, and law enforcement wins because they have the guns."

Such a system can cause a dangerous ripple effect. Some doctors become fearful of scrutiny by authorities, and the potential loss of professional standing and livelihood, as well as the possibility of incarceration. In a scholarly paper DeLuca presented in April, "The War on Drugs, the War on Doctors, and the Pain Crisis in America," he says prosecutions of doctors for drug violations have risen during John Ashcroft's reign as attorney general.

There's even a name for doctor's anxieties over being labeled a drug dealer: "The Chilling Effect." DeLuca defines it as "the withdrawal by physicians from the appropriate treatment of pain resulting from fear of litigation."

Dr. Clifford A. Bernstein, a pain specialist in Beverly Hills, Calif., much prefers other treatments to opiates, but he still prescribes them. He says the way to avoid the Chilling Effect is to "keep good records. There's nothing wrong with people being on narcotics, but you have to assess the patient, warn about the dangers of these drugs and justify their use in your notes."

Apprehensive pain doctors blame the War on Drugs for the current predicament. It's a war that targets not just dealers and dopers, but doctors and their patients too. DeLuca writes: "The root cause of the widespread undertreatment of pain can be traced directly to the systematic, nationally coordinated, relentless harassment, arrest and prosecution of thousands of American physicians, many of whom had been engaged in nothing other than the standard care of pain and addiction of the day."

The big losers in all of this? Chronic pain sufferers.

Take the case of Robert Stevens, one of Dr. Fisher's patients, who has a ruined back. Five years ago, before Fisher was busted, Stevens, who was on Social Security disability for a mental condition, rode a bike several miles a day and enjoyed a decent quality of life. He took a maintenance dose of OxyContin.

With Fisher gone, Stevens immediately reduced his dose to the lowest he could stand. "I figured I needed to wean myself off," he explains. "But I wasn't prepared for the amount of pain I would be in. It was four years since I'd been in that kind of pain."

Stevens soon became bed-bound. "It felt like an abscess tooth for months upon months with no escape," he says by phone, the pain audible in his voice. "I got headaches from gritting my teeth all the time, my legs cramped up. I thought, 'This isn't living; why don't I just stop it?' Fortunately, I had a support system of people telling me to hang on, or I wouldn't be here now."

Stevens finally found a doctor willing to treat him in Fresno. Once a month, he would make the 656-mile round trip to fill his OxyContin script. It was worth it. But then his doctor dropped him, saying he had concerns about the toll the car rides were taking.

Stevens takes methadone now, which he says is about half as effective as OxyContin. He's in bed most of the time. "I've got paperwork to start going to mental health [care] for suicidal thoughts," he says in a monotone. "And depression."

Studies suggest there are a lot of Robert Stevenses in the country. Their supporters offer a simple solution: Let physicians assess pain patients and prescribe them the medication they need. And keep law enforcement out of the doctor's office. "We need to have the remedicalization of the whole arena," says Reynolds of Pain Relief Network. "Move controlled substances from the Justice Department over to the FDA; don't classify them according to superstitious notions; make distinctions between substances based on medical judgments."

Before the first trial in late 2001, Linda begged Richard to accept a period of house arrest, followed by probation. He already was under a sort of house arrest, she argued. Richard finally agreed, but when he got in front of the judge to seal his plea bargain, he balked, then broke down sobbing. The judge canceled the deal.Two arduous trials ensued, each thrown out or overturned. And still the State Attorney's Office in Pasco pursued the drug trafficking charges. The prosecution made more offers, but each required jail time, and Paey passed.

"They should've dropped the trafficking charges," Linda Paey says, her voice rising. "They held this huge hammer over our heads, and then said they were being nice guys by offering plea deals. They should not have charged him with the trafficking statute knowing he was not a trafficker."

But the Paeys overestimated the court's inclination toward mercy. Richard was, in effect, punished in part for not playing by the rules. The Paey camp insisted that the charges be dropped or reduced without concessions from them -- concessions that would essentially admit to a criminal act -- and such obstinacy does not play well to the prosecutorial mindset.

Assistant State Attorney Scott Andringa, the lead prosecutor, explained it this way: "As a trial lawyer, normally you charge the highest crime that you can prove. If it goes to trail, you might as well lean on that. Then there's [the option] to plead the case out. I understand someone wanting to have their day in court But they have to accept that with that there's a risk, and in the case of Richard Paey it was a 25-year mandatory minimum, which he knowingly and willingly accepted.

"While I have sympathy for him, the system did what it does. Everyone did their job. We made a decision based on laws passed by the Legislature and signed by the governor. We made the right filing decision as evidenced by the jury's verdict. I don't see this as an issue of whether our office did the right thing I have no personal or professional regret about what we've done in this case."

When asked if 25 years in state prison was a proper punishment for Richard Paey's crime, Andringa said, "It's not appropriate for me to give my personal opinion [about that]."

Reynolds replied passionately to Andringa's points in an e-mail: "When you take power away from judges, you give it to prosecutors. If they have the power to induce pleas with the threat of draconian sentences, the defense attorneys are reduced to making deals that minimize the damage done to the lives of defendants who, by the way, have at the time of making the deals, been convicted of absolutely nothing. What goes on, therefore, is a systematic denial of due process, a parallel criminal justice system that consists only of targeting and punishment, a parallel system that is essentially operating outside judicial review."

Eli Stutsman, the Paeys' newly acquired appellate attorney, declined to comment on strategies, saying that he hadn't even received the trial transcript yet. But Attridge, who defended Paey at his last trial, said their main thrust for appeal would be "the perjured testimony of the doctor, which was what the verdict was based on. The state should've known it was perjured. He's entitled to a new trial."

Although Richard Paey was not allowed phone calls or visitors during his stay in the transitional facility, he did get a letter to Linda. They'd shorn his hair and put him in the infirmary because of his morphine pump.

He received some disquieting news. Department of Corrections policy is not to refill morphine pumps, although no decision had yet been made on his particular case. Stutsman called the DOC and impressed upon officials the importance of continuing the treatment.

In early June, Paey was moved to his permanent facility, Zephyrhills Correctional Institution in Pasco County. He wrote his wife and said, "I was told they're going to refill my pump." Then, in a letter Linda received on June 7, he wrote, "I haven't heard anything about my [morphine] pump, other than the staff doctors remark that he didn't know how to handle one of them. It's been said, though, that I was sent here primarily because Zephyrhills could take care of the pump."

Meanwhile, Linda Paey, who for so long had fought the good fight, must confront reality. "Now they're processing him to be in prison for 25 years," she says, her voice cracking. "It's more than depressing. It's scary. This wasn't supposed to happen."

Information for portions of this story was culled from court testimony and depositions. Contact senior writer Eric Snider at 813-739-4853.

Reason Magazine Online

Pill Sham

A Man Seeking Pain Relief Gets 25 Years For Drug Trafficking

By Jacob Sullum

Here's a bit of legal information that may interest Rush Limbaugh: Under Florida law, illegally obtaining more than 28 grams of painkillers containing the narcotic oxycodone -- a threshold exceeded by a single 60-pill Percocet prescription -- automatically makes you the worst sort of drug trafficker, even if you never sold a single pill. Even if, like Richard Paey, you were using the drugs to relieve severe chronic pain.

Although prosecutors admitted Paey was not a drug trafficker, on April 16 he received a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years for drug trafficking. That jaw-dropping outcome illustrates two sadly familiar side effects of the war on drugs: the injustice caused by mandatory minimum sentences and the suffering caused by the government's interference with pain treatment.

Paey, a 45-year-old father of three, is disabled as a result of a 1985 car accident, failed back surgery, and multiple sclerosis. Today, as he sits in jail in his wheelchair, a subdermal pump delivers a steady, programmed dose of morphine to his spine. But for years he treated his pain with Percocet, Lortab (a painkiller containing the narcotic hydrocodone), and Valium prescribed by his doctor in New Jersey, Steven Nurkiewicz.

When Paey and his family moved to Florida in 1994, he had trouble finding a new doctor. Because he had developed tolerance to the pain medication, he needed high doses, and because he was not on the verge of death, he needed them indefinitely. As many people who suffer from chronic pain can testify, both of those factors make doctors nervous, since they know the government is looking over their shoulders while they write prescriptions.

Unable to find a local physician who was comfortable taking him on as a patient, Paey used undated prescription forms from Nurkiewicz's office to obtain painkillers in Florida. Paey says Nurkiewicz authorized these prescriptions, which the doctor (who could face legal trouble of his own) denies.

The Pasco County Sheriff's Office began investigating Paey in late 1996 after receiving calls from suspicious pharmacists. Detectives tracked Paey as he filled prescriptions for 1,200 pills from January 1997 until his arrest that March.

At first investigators assumed Paey must be selling the pills, since they thought the amounts were too large for him to consume on his own. But the police never found any evidence of that, and two years after his arrest prosecutors offered him a deal: If he pleaded guilty to attempted trafficking, he would receive eight years of probation, including three years of house arrest.

Paey initially agreed but then had second thoughts. His wife, Linda, says he worried that he could go to prison if he was accused of violating his probation. More fundamentally, he did not want to identify himself as a criminal when he believed he had done nothing wrong. He has since turned down other plea deals involving prison time.

Meanwhile, prosecutors have pursued Paey in three trials. The first ended in a mistrial; the second resulted in a conviction that the judge threw out because of a procedural error; and the third, which ended last month, produced guilty verdicts on 15 charges of drug trafficking, obtaining a controlled substance by fraud, and possession of a controlled substance.

A juror later told the St. Petersburg Times he did not really think Paey was guilty of trafficking, since the prosecution made it clear from the outset that he didn't sell any pills. The juror said he voted guilty to avoid being the lone holdout. He suggested that other jurors might have voted differently if the foreman had not assured them Paey would get probation.

The prosecutors, who finally obtained the draconian sentence that even they concede Paey does not deserve, say it's his fault for insisting on his innocence. "It's unfortunate that anyone 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. "All we wanted to do was get him help."

Paey's real crime, it seems, is not drug trafficking but ingratitude. "My husband was so adamant, and so strongly defending this from the very beginning, that it might have annoyed them," says Linda Paey. "They were extremely upset that he would not accept a plea bargain. They felt that anyone who had any common sense would.... But he didn't want to say he was guilty of something he didn't do."

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason and the author of Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use (Tarcher/Putnam).

© Copyright 2004 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

St. Petersburg Times

Where's justice for Richard Paey?

St. Petersburg Times, Ediorials

Re: Richard Paey

Editor: I'm Richard Paey's aunt and I can't believe he is going to jail over drugs that were used by him only due to pain.

Let's be honest, and I mean honest: If he was a Hollywood movie star, had lots of money or was in politics, he would not be going to jail. It's only for the poor or middle class. It makes you sick when you think here is a man who was only hurting himself and no one else and look what they are doing to him. It's a real joke.

If you and I were in real bad pain we would do the same. We'd do whatever we could to get rid of the pain.

So let's come down to Earth and let God be the judge and let him go home to heal.


-- Arline VanDeventer, New Jersey

St. Petersburg Times

From Painkillers To Prison

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.

St. Petersburg Times

Pain not enough to tip the scale of man's justice

Richard Paey has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for drug trafficking. He never sold a pill. And he says chronic, disabling pain was his motivation.

By CARY DAVIS, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times

The typical drug trafficker is not a graduate of an Ivy League law school. Nor is he a victim of botched back surgery whose chronic pain forced him into a wheelchair -- and left him hooked on prescription drugs.

There's no evidence that Richard Paey ever sold pills to anyone else, but when investigators discovered that he had illegally obtained more than 1,000 painkillers, they charged him with drug trafficking. That's the same charge they throw at drug lords who move, for instance, hundreds of pounds of cocaine.

State prosecutors realized the potential punishment for trafficking didn't fit Paey's crime.

"We took into account the fact that he is disabled, his medical condition . . . and it seemed like the proper disposition was to get him treatment," said Assistant State Attorney Richard Mensh, the chief prosecutor in Pasco.

So, prosecutors offered the 43-year-old Hudson man house arrest and probation, a sweetheart deal considering that most convicted traffickers go to prison for decades.

But no matter how many times prosecutors offered him a way out, Paey balked.

And now he is paying a heavy price.

Two weeks ago, Paey risked a trial and lost. A jury convicted him of eight counts of trafficking in oxycodone. Equally significant was that Paey had obtained more than 28 grams of the oxycodone pills illegally. That pushed him into the toughest category of Florida's minimum mandatory sentencing laws for drug trafficking.

The law couldn't be clearer: A judge must sentence Paey to at least 25 years in prison.

"I have to question my own judgment," Paey said of his decision to stand trial. "It's hard to swallow."

For Paey, there was only one way out of his predicament. Hours after his conviction, he nearly succeeded in taking his own life. He sharpened his jail medical tag and slashed his neck and wrist. He just missed the major artery in his neck and had to be flown to a Tampa hospital.

"It was a moment of despair," he said. "The deepest despair of a lifetime of unending suffering."

* * *
The suffering began in 1985, when Paey was a student at the University of Pennsylvania law school. He was involved in a bad car wreck and suffered a severely herniated disk in his lower back. The first surgery failed.

A second operation, an experimental procedure involving screws, only made matters worse. The screws splintered his backbone and mangled the delicate network of nerves surrounding his spine, he said.

"The center of my back is one big knot, to the point where I have trouble breathing," Paey said in a recent jailhouse interview.

It took him an extra year, but Paey managed to graduate from law school. He took his exams standing up.

But Paey never sat for the bar exam. He couldn't sit for that long without his medications. And the rules said he couldn't be under the influence of any narcotics during the grueling exam.

Paey has been collecting disability since 1989.

Soon after his second surgery, Paey developed a physical dependence on painkilling drugs, he said. Gradually, he said, he built up a tolerance to the drugs. To combat the pain, he said, he needed more pills, which became a problem when he moved his wife and three kids to Florida in 1994. His doctor was in New Jersey.

He had trouble finding local doctors to write his high-dosage prescriptions. The doctors willing to accept him as a patient became skittish after fielding calls from suspicious pharmacists, he said.

So Paey began writing his own prescriptions.

His New Jersey doctor, Steven Nurkiewicz, had given Paey several undated prescriptions. Those, plus a copy machine, provided Paey with an endless supply of fraudulent prescriptions, prosecutors said.

Paey said Nurkiewicz gave him permission to copy the undated prescriptions. On the stand at Paey's trail, Nurkiewicz denied that.

Investigators from the Pasco County Sheriff's Office and the federal Drug Enforcement Administration started tailing Paey in late 1996. Over a three-month period, they watched Paey, always in a wheelchair, enter one pharmacy after another. During that period, investigators said, Paey used fraudulent prescriptions to obtain 800 pills of Percocet, a painkiller made with oxycodone. He also obtained 400 pills each of the painkiller Lortab, made with hydrocodone, and Valium, the investigators said.

Over a year's time, investigators said in a search warrant application, Paey filled some 200 prescriptions for 18,000 pills.

The investigators also watched Paey's home. No one man, they thought, could consume so many pills. They suspected he was dealing. They never found any evidence to back up their suspicions.

In March 1997, Paey was arrested for trafficking.

Paey now gets his medications legally. Only now, in addition to pills, he has a morphine pump hooked up directly to his stomach. The pump administers the equivalent of a shot glass of morphine every day into Paey's system.

The drugs have never given him any pleasure, Paey said, only a little relief.

The pain has gotten so bad, Paey said, that he can't get around without a wheelchair. To make matters worse, he said, he was diagnosed four years ago with multiple sclerosis.

* * *
Oxycodone and other painkillers were incorporated into Florida's drug trafficking laws in 1995. Under the new laws, illegal possession of more than 4 grams of oxycodone, about seven pills, elevates the crime to trafficking. The trafficking law does not require that a defendant be caught selling drugs.

For more than 28 grams of oxycodone, the penalty is severe. A conviction carries a minimum mandatory sentence of 25 years in prison and a $500,000 fine. By contrast, someone convicted of trafficking 10,000 pounds of marijuana faces a minimum mandatory of 15 years in prison and a $200,000 fine.

Lawmakers probably didn't have Richard Paey in mind when they passed the tough new sentencing laws. That's where prosecutors come in.

Prosecutors have the power to introduce a human element when reality doesn't match the black-and-white world of statutes. That's exactly what they did in Paey's case, prosecutor Mensh said.

They negotiated with Paey's first attorney, Bob Attridge, and offered a deal. Paey could plead down to attempted trafficking and avoid prison altogether. The deal called for eight years' probation, the first three to be served on house arrest.

A change of plea hearing was scheduled for Jan. 8, 1999. But midway through the hearing, Paey began to vacillate. Then he broke down. Circuit Judge Stanley Mills refused to accept the plea and stopped the hearing.

Attridge still isn't sure why Paey wavered over the plea agreement. "He couldn't articulate to me why he didn't take the deal," Attridge said.

Eventually, Paey stopped returning Attridge's calls and skipped appointments with the lawyer. Attridge withdrew from the case.

The next defense attorney on the case, Keith Hammond, couldn't get Paey's authorization to negotiate with prosecutors.

"If I had gotten the go-ahead from him," Hammond said, "I think I could have worked something out."

Said Paey: "I didn't want to plead guilty to some horrendous crime. It's like child molestation. It's horrible."

And so, five years after Paey's arrest, the case went to trial.

Halfway through the trial, as the evidence against him mounted, Paey had second thoughts. He asked prosecutors to make an offer.

Pasco-Pinellas State Attorney Bernie McCabe has a policy against offering plea deals once a trial begins. But in this case, prosecutors made an exception. They offered Paey 71/2 years in prison.

Paey rejected it.

And then he was convicted.

"We reached out to him," said Mensh, "and he kept turning us down. There comes a point when you have to accept the consequences of your actions. These are consequences he brought upon himself."

Paey has one more chance to avoid the harsh consequences. His attorneys are asking for a new trial, arguing that Paey was incompetent.

Competency was at issue during Paey's trial. Senior Judge Robert Beach ordered a competency evaluation after Paey started nodding off during testimony.

The psychologist who conducted the evaluation testified that the combination of powerful painkillers and stress had rendered Paey incompetent to stand trial. Judge Beach rejected that finding.

Should Paey fail in his efforts to win a new trial, there is nothing that allows a judge to depart from minimum mandatory sentencing guidelines, attorneys say.

That's wrong, said Attridge, who has been rehired to handle the appeal.

"He's being punished more severely than someone who traffics 300 pounds of cocaine," Attridge said. "You can see that things are way out of kilter."

-- Cary Davis covers courts in west Pasco County. He can be reached in west Pasco at 869-6236, or toll-free at 1-800-333-7505, ext. 6236.

If you have ever wondered about the place of art in social struggle, wander through some of Richard Paey's original cartoons. While imprisoned, Richard drew cartoons and sent original art to advocates at the Pain Relief Network and the offices here at the November Coalition. They made us laugh, sometimes cry and we shared them with a growing national network of citizens who appreciated Richard's political commentary. Even the New York Times included a link to this Toons by Paey collection.

People created T-shirts, letterheads and posters to post around their communities. November Coalition launched a postcard campaign using the "Food Must Be Great" cartoon. Directing them to Florida's Governors Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist, urging them to let Richard Paey go home to his family, what was left of his life.