A LIFE OF PAIN MAY GET WORSE

The typical drug trafficker is not a graduate of an Ivy League law school.
Nor is he a victim of botched back surgery that created chronic pain,
forced him to rely on 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."

Paey now sits in the Pasco County jail awaiting a sentencing hearing. But
hours after his conviction he saw only one way out of his predicament. 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 trial, 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.

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.