CHRONIC-PAIN SUFFERER FIGHTS DRUG SENTENCE

The Imprisoned Accident Victim Says He Needed Narcotics To Ease His Suffering

TAMPA -- Supporters say Richard Paey was a wheelchair-bound man in
constant, brutal pain who needed large amounts of prescription
narcotics just to live a normal life.

Prosecutors say he sought way too many of those often-abused
painkillers, and that makes him a criminal.

On Tuesday, as Paey's attorney tried to persuade the 2nd District
Court of Appeal to throw out his 2004 drug-trafficking convictions
and mandatory 25-year sentence, advocates for chronic-pain sufferers
said the case illustrates flaws in the law and how people dependent
on strong pain medication can get tangled up in the government's
overzealous war on drugs.

"I don't think anybody ever thought the war on drugs was going to
mean a war on pain patients and their doctors, but that is in fact
what it has meant," said Siobhan Reynolds of the Pain Relief Network,
an advocacy group that is helping with Paey's appeal.

Paey is a 47-year-old former attorney and father of three who
suffered a back injury in a 1985 car accident and since has been
diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He was left in a wheelchair and
constant agony.

Nothing blunted the pain -- he has described it as feeling like his
legs were on fire -- except strong narcotics such as Percocet and
Vicodin, which he bought from pharmacies in numbers that got the
attention of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration.

Prosecutors said he was forging prescriptions and getting so many
pills that he had to be selling them, even though investigators'
two-month surveillance turned up nothing. Paey said that because
doctors in Florida were reluctant to prescribe medication in the
amounts he required, he got his former doctor in New Jersey to send
him undated prescriptions he could fill here.

The doctor testified at trial that he had never authorized the number
of the pills Paey bought, even though other evidence contradicted
him. A jury convicted Paey, and the judge imposed the minimum
mandatory sentence of 25 years.

Paey's wife, Linda, said her husband was offered plea deals that
would have kept him out of prison. But he rejected them because he
didn't think he had done anything wrong.

On Tuesday, his attorney, John P. Flannery, told the three-judge
appellate panel that the 25-year mandatory sentence was cruel and
unusual punishment. Further, Flannery said, the doctor lied on the
witness stand, and the prosecutor knew it.

The appeals court did not indicate when it would rule.