FLORIDA KEEPS DEFENDANT A PRISONER OF PAIN

After I wrote last year about Richard Paey, the wheelchair-bound
patient who's been in physical agony for two decades, a lot of readers
asked me what kind of monster could have prosecuted him for obtaining
painkillers. If you watched "60 Minutes" Sunday, you saw what kind.

Scott Andringa, the prosecutor in Florida who sent Paey to prison for
25 years, did not come off well on "60 Minutes," but he didn't look
dementedly evil, either.

He seemed exactly the way I've found him in interviews: earnest,
conscientious, convinced he had done the right thing. That's why he
scares me.

He's one of the many well-meaning public officials whose judgment has
been so warped by the war on drugs that they can't see what they've
become.

"I have the utmost respect for doctors who try to treat pain humanely
and responsibly," he told me. "I am not a doctor. I have never
claimed to be a doctor."

Yet there he was playing doctor on "60 Minutes" to explain why it was
"reasonable" to infer that Paey was a drug dealer.

There was no evidence that Paey had sold any of his painkillers (and
agents had conducted surveillance of him and his wife for two months).
But Andringa inferred that Paey must have been selling them because
the prescriptions he received worked out to about 25 pills per day.

"One pill every hour, every day, for two years," Andringa told Morley
Safer, as if this feat of math proved his case.

Paey had no trouble explaining to me why he was taking 25 pills per
day: his doctor cautiously gave him a variety of low-strength pills in
order to avoid prescribing the kind of painkillers that tempt drug
abusers and invite investigation from the Drug Enforcement
Administration

The total daily dose of oxycodone in all those pills Paey took was
less than what he could have gotten in a single high-strength
OxyContin pill. Yet Andringa simply made his own medical diagnosis --
too many pills.

Paey told me he was offered a deal by investigators: "They said if
you're willing to testify against your doctor it would go a long way
to having these charges go away." Paey refused, and then found himself
facing hostile testimony from the doctor, who said he had not
authorized the contested prescriptions.

After the doctor's credibility was challenged in court -- he was
contradicted both by his own words and by pharmacists who said he'd
approved the prescriptions -- the prosecutor came up with a mind-
boggling new argument.

He argued that the doctor wasn't practicing proper medicine --
according to the prosecutor's standards -- so the prescriptions were
illegal and Paey shouldn't have filled them.

I spoke to Andringa yesterday, after he'd watched "60 Minutes" and
seen Paey's wife and the three teenage children whose father may die
in prison. "I'm not thrilled about this case," he said. "I'm only
proud that I did my job as a prosecutor."

And self-appointed doctor.