DRUG WAR OFFERS BITTER PILL

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, only to revealize it was his legs.

"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.

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 former friend, who denied giving Paey some of the
prescriptions. 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.

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. 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."