RICHARD PAEY SPEAKS

An interview with the paraplegic man sentenced to 25 years in prison
for treating his own pain.

In October of this year, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist signed a pardon
for Richard Paey, a paraplegic with multiple sclerosis who had served
nearly four years of a 25-year prison sentence for drug trafficking.
Paey, who requires high-dose opioid therapy to treat pain brought on
by his MS, a car accident, and a botched back surgery, was convicted
of trafficking despite concessions from prosecutors that there was no
evidence the painkillers in his possession were for anything other
than his own use. When police came to arrest the wheel-chair bound
Paey, they came with a full-on SWAT team, battering down the door and
rushing into the home of the wheelchair-bound Paey, his optometrist
wife, and their two schoolage children.

Prosecutors offered Paey a plea bargain, but he refused, insisting
that he'd done nothing wrong, and that he shouldn't have to plead
guilty to a felony for treating his own pain. Paey was tried,
convicted, and given a 25-year mandatory minimum sentence. While in
prison, the state of Florida paid for a morphine pump that
administered painkillers to Paey at rates higher than what the state
convicted him of for possessing in the first place.

Christ and Florida's pardon board issued Paey's pardon after heavy
media coverage of his case, including by 60 Minutes, and the New York
Times, as well as by reason's own Jacob Sullum and Radley Balko.

On November 13, reason senior editor Radley Balko interviewed Paey
from his Florida home by phone.

reason: How is life since you've been released?

Richard Paey: It's dreamlike. I have to catch myself now and then.
Particularly when I wake up in the morning. I have to reorient where
I am now with where I've been for almost four years. There are times
when I'm not sure if I'm awake or still dreaming. In prison, you
survive by developing routines. You stop thinking. The routine
becomes your life. You follow set behaviors. I still engage in that
when I wake up. It's a different reality.

I didn't do very well in prison. Fortunately, one of the prison
doctors was very kind to me. He said he saw in me what he called "the
consciousness of innocence." It's very dangerous. He said if you
bring it into prison with you, you will have the most horrifying
experience that a human being can possibly have. You won't survive.
You have to acclimate and accept your situation and not resist. You
can't keep holding on to your innocence. You have to let go of it and
start acclimating.

But I wasn't doing that. Apparently, he'd see this "consciousness of
innocence" every now and then in a prison patient--people who clung
to the idea that they were innocent, and might eventually get out. He
said it will do more damage to you than any disease.

reason: How were you treated by other inmates?

Paey: Very well, actually. That was one surprise. I'd almost call it
a shock. People I would never have associated with--people I'd have
been afraid of if I'd seen them in a free-world environment on the
street, people with tattoos, crazy hair, and so on--as I got to know
them, and was accepted as one of them, they treated me very well. I
never had the fear of violence form any of the other inmates. In
fact, something else happened. It was the opposite. I found I had
more fear of some of the officers who worked in the system and
engaged in behaviors that we'd like to think don't go on in the prison system.

There was an old Cuban man I met when I was transferred to the
facility in Lake Butler. When I arrived there, he was the first
person I met. He told me the difference between the American prison
system and the prison system in Cuba: He said that in Cuba they hit
you, but they hit you in front of everybody. He said in America, they
beat you behind the building, or in a private room where no on is
looking. He'd been in both, and he said that was the difference.

reason: Were you ever beaten?

Paey: I was frequently verbally abused. The older inmates tell me the
outright physical abuse has tapered down. As far as physical abuse,
there was one time I was hit by an officer. I had been shipped out
from Zephyr Hills to Butler after my interview with John Tierney [of
the New York Times]. When I got there, they put me in solitary
confinement. When I kept collapsing, they had a medical doctor
examine me, and he had them move me out of solitary and into a hospital.

So I was sleeping in my bed at around one o'clock in the morning. The
lights were on--the lights are always on--and the shift officers were
conducting their "shake down"--which means they come in and go
through all of your belongings to search for contraband. It seemed to
come out of nowhere, he had a radio in his hand, and he swung it down
as hard as he could and he hit my legs with it. If I could have
gotten out of bed and hit him, I would have. He said to me, "I just
wanted to see if you had feeling in your legs." He saw the wheelchair
next to my bed, and that the sheet was covering my legs.

I was so furious. I refused to give him my name. I didn't say a word.
I was afraid if I spoke, I'd say something that would get him
angrier. When he realized he wasn't going to get a word out of me, he
asked if I could talk. I didn't answer. He said he was going to check
to see if I could talk, and if he found out I could, he was going to
send me back to confinement. The next day, I was transferred out of
the hospital, and didn't see that officer again.

But there are other kinds of abuse that you wouldn't think about.
There were only a handful of officers that were bad, but those few
can really do a lot of harm. The kind of thing that goes on today is
less noticeable, but it's damaging. Things like leaving the lights on
24 hours a day. I went more than 30 days in solitary where the lights
were on the entire time. It was this callous indifference of a
particular officer. And other things, like slamming the doors when
they do security checks. They come by every hour and give your door a
loud kick. When you're inside a cell and someone comes by and gives
that big iron door a kick once an hour, the sound just ricochets
between your ears. So systematic sleep deprivation is common. I would
see men go into solitary and when they came out weeks later, their
hair would be completely gray.

This kind of thing was typical from the officers who weren't happy
with their work, or were looking to inflict additional punishment on
inmates. Some of thought prison wasn't enough for us, that part of
their job responsibility was to inflict additional punishment on us.

reason: You mention getting transferred to Butler Lake, the
maximum-security prison across the state, several hours further away
from your family. That transfer happened shortly after your interview
with John Tierney of the New York Times. Do you think the transfer
was retaliation--punishment for talking to a journalist?

Paey: That's what I was told. That's what a friendly prison nurse
told my wife after the interview. And just after the interview, one
of the prison officers who was on good terms with me told me that the
guard who sat in on my interview with Tierney had gone to his captain
about writing me a disciplinary report--which is the first step
toward sending someone to solitary. He said I had said thing in the
interview that I shouldn't have said, and that they were going to act
on it. There are designated "transfer days" when they move inmates
between facilities. About two weeks later, on a day not scheduled to
be a transfer day, the sergeant came up to me at around midnight and
told me to pack my things. I was being shipped out to Lake Butler.
They had no explanation. I couldn't decline the move. It wasn't
medical in nature.

The move was tough. The sun was up by the time they moved me. It was
of those insufferable July days. The fan they transfer you in has no
air conditioning, and only the driver's window opens, and only about
an inch. So I'm dying in the back of the van, strapped down in my
wheelchair in this suffocating heat, where you can't move, and
there's no air circulating. I ended up falling over, and they had to
drive back and do it all over. They ended up taking me an ambulance a
few days later.

reason: You say you were put in solitary confinement at Lake Butler.
Was that for your health--to keep you from other inmates? Or was that
punishment, too?

Paey: Laughs. When I got up to Lake Butler, they didn't know why I
was there. They had no paperwork on my transfer. This is going to
sound absurd. Even now I find it difficult to believe. But when my
wife Linda began calling the Department of Corrections about my
transfer, they told her that a particular doctor had ordered my
transfer. Linda called this doctor, got her on the phone. The doctor
looked at my transfer order and said, "I didn't sign that. I don't
know who signed that. Somebody used my signature stamp to sign that.
I had no part in this transfer."

Now, what's going on, here? I'm being moved out of my permanent camp,
which is close to my home and family, I'm being moved to the Siberia
of the Florida corrections system, and they put me in solitary
confinement once I got there. And nobody knows who authorized it? And
the doctor the paperwork says ordered it says she never ordered it?
So where do you go from there? What do you do?

reason: And to be clear, this was punitive solitary confinement. You
weren't isolated in a medical ward.

Paey: This place looked like a bomb shelter. Solid cement walls, no
windows. You get in through a small hatch. I was pushed inside, and
that became my home until Linda's calls persuaded the doctor to come
and see me in August. One of the doctors told me the heat index in
there was 105. There's no air conditioning. I'm in a cell where
there's no air movement. To survive, you strip down to your boxers.
You use sink water to soak rags and put them on the back of your
neck. They feed you through a slot in the door. There are no bars,
like in the movies. It's all solid, cement walls and doors. That's
where I stayed for two weeks until I started passing out. After that,
they moved me to the hospital.

reason: How is your health now?

Paey: I think I'm doing well, considering.

reason: Are you getting the medication you need?

Paey: Well, at some point we're going to have a cash crisis. When I
got out of prison, I went down to Social Security, and they said
they'd never seen a pardon before. Before I went to prison, I was
getting Social Security disability, and was on Medicare A and B.
Well, when you get convicted of a felony and go to prison, you lose
all of those benefits. They're not really sure how to handle it--if
the pardon makes me eligible again or not. They're now telling us
that it may not be until next June until they know. That was terrible news.

reason: Aside from actually being able to pay for the
medication--which of course is a significant problem--if you can find
a way to pay, you'll be able to get painkiller you need, and at the
doses you need them?

Paey: Yes. I was told I'd be able to get the medication if I can pay for it.

reason: Is that true of everyone in Florida, or do you think you're
getting special access because of the high-profile nature of your case?

Paey: I'm being given access because I'm a high profile case.

reason: So still today, a chronic pain patient not named Richard Paey
would have the same problems you did obtaining these drugs at the
doses they need, and might face the same sort of prosecution if they
tried to get them?

Paey: That's right.

reason: Governor Crist and Florida Attorney General McCullom both not
only voted for your pardon, they both expressed regret that perhaps
mandatory minimums and zero tolerance drug laws had gone too
far--pretty notable statements coming from two stalwart advocates of
the drug war. Are you aware of any efforts by them or the Florida
legislature to reform these laws?

Paey: I don't know if those two in particular are doing anything. I
know that advocates here in Florida including people from Families
Against Mandatory Minimums and the November Coalition are pushing
legislation to deal with the problem. One bill would I think would
remove prescribed opiates from the drug trafficking statutes. I
believe the November Coalition wants to use my case as a platform to
go after mandatory minimums both in Florida and in other states--to
point to my case as an example of the absurd results that can come
from these laws. I'm not aware of anything the governor or anyone in
Tallahassee in particular are doing to remedy the problem that
brought my case to their attention.

reason: Many people have compared your case to that of Rush Limbaugh.
Some have said Limbaugh was let off because of his political
affiliation. But reason's Jacob Sullum has suggested Limbaugh was let
off because he played the drug warrior's game--he admitted he was an
"addict," and took his punishment. But you refused to say you were an
addict, or concede that you'd done anything wrong. You insisted you
needed painkillers to live a normal life. Sullum believes that's why
Limbaugh got a slap on the wrist, while you got 25 years.

Paey: I think Sullum's take is pretty accurate. Mr. Limbaugh chose to
label himself an addict. What I didn't understand when I went to
trial is that there is a tremendous fear of addiction in this
country. The prosecutor in my case didn't see me as a patient,
despite incontrovertible evidence that I was indeed a patient with a
long history of medical records showing that I needed this
medication. In the prosecutor's mind, this was simply too much
medication for one patient. He didn't want to hear about tolerance or
high-dose therapy. The fact that I had taken the medication for more
than a few years made me an addict in his mind. That became the
prosecution's theme--that I was an "addict." He repeated the term
"drug addict" eight times in his closing argument. He didn't call me
a "chronic pain patient." Even though he was forced to recognize
during the trial that I had legitimate medical problem, and had a
legitimate medical history, I was still an "addict."

This is a serious problem we have in this country--this fear of
addiction, and how we perceive the use of prescription drugs. There
are lots of myths and misconceptions out there.

Whoever was counseling Rush Limbaugh gave him good advice. Admitting
he was an addict played to his favor. I was convicted because the
prosecutor hammered away at the jury that I was an addict and that my
doctor was a pusher. I was sort of blindsided when the prosecutor
started to make that argument--that I was nothing more than an
addict. I can't think of a worse slur to attach to a person.

reason: And once you were in prison, the state of Florida then
administered an opioid painkiller to you at doses higher than those
for which the same state had just labeled you an addict and convicted you.

Paey: Right. It became a comedy of bureaucracies. One agency
prosecutes me for taking too much medication. And that was their
explanation--that my dose was too high for one person to be taking,
therefore I must be selling it. Even though they conceded they had no
evidence of that. Then I get to prison, and the doctors examine my
records and my medical history, and they decide that as doctors, they
have to give me this medication, and in fact it was in higher doses
than what I'd been getting before.

It certainly was an irony that I was prosecuted for taking too much
medication, then the state went ahead and gave me more once I was in
prison. And I think that irony made many people take a second look at
my situation. It raised a red flag in many peoples' minds that
something strange was going on, here.

reason: What was the first thing you did after you were released?

Paey: It occurred so fast, and it was so unexpected. I think Linda
and I both thought it would take weeks. And after the pardon, they
rushed me out of the prison. The first thing I did was grab my kids
and hug them. Knowing that I'm here, at home, was beyond anyone's
wildest dreams. We're still in a kind of euphoria. I have to keep
reminding my family that I'm here, and they have to remind me that
I'm not in prison anymore. We still have a hard time believing this
is happening--that this isn't imagination. I'm just thrilled to be
home with my family.