MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS SUFFERER SERVING 25-YEAR SENTENCE FOR TAKING PAIN KILLERS

Florida's Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from Richard Paey, a
wheelchair-using father of three who is currently serving a 25-year
mandatory prison sentence for taking his own pain medication. In
doing so, the court let stand a decision which essentially claims
that the courts have no role in checking the powers of the executive
and legislative branches of government when an individual outcome is
patently unjust.

Richard Paey -- who suffers both multiple sclerosis and from the
aftermath of a disastrous and barbaric back surgery that resulted in
multiple major malpractice judgments -- now receives virtually twice
as much morphine in prison than the equivalent in opioid medications
for which he was convicted of forging prescriptions.

He had previously been given legitimate prescriptions for the same
doses of pain medicine -- but made the mistake of moving to Florida
from New Jersey, where he could not find a physician to treat his
pain adequately. Each of his medical conditions alone can produce
agony. Paey has described his pain as constantly feeling like his
legs had been "dipped into a furnace."

The Ivy-league educated attorney has no prior criminal convictions,
and weeks of surveillance by narcotics agents did not find him
selling the medications.

The Florida Court of Appeals had upheld his conviction -- despite the
lack of evidence of trafficking and despite the fact that most of
weight of the substances he was convicted of possessing (higher
weights lead to longer sentences) was made up of Tylenol, not
narcotics. The majority suggested that Paey seek clemency from the
governor, claiming that his plea for mercy "does not fall on deaf
ears, but it falls on the wrong ears."

In a jeremiad of a dissent, Judge James Seals called the sentence
"illogical, absurd, unjust and unconstitutional," noting that Paey
"could conceivably go to prison for a longer stretch for peacefully
but unlawfully purchasing 100 oxycodone pills from a pharmacist than
had he robbed the pharmacist at knife point, stolen 50 oxycodone
pills, which he intended to sell to children waiting outside, and
then stabbed the pharmacist."

But the Florida Supreme Court disagreed, letting the sentence stand,
without comment. It released its cowardly decision in the media quiet
of a Friday night. As Siobhan Reynolds, founder of the Pain Relief
Network points out, "Where Florida stands now is that individuals
have no recourse to the courts when the executive and legislative
branches behave tyranically." Under the Constitution, the role of the
judiciary is supposed to be to check the powers of the other branches
-- not simply to defer to them.

Paey's only other alternatives now are an appeal to the U.S. Supreme
Court or clemency from Governor Charlie Crist.

Writing in support of clemency, leading academic pain specialist
Russell Portenoy, MD, said, "the information available indicates that
any questionable actions [Paey] took, actions which led ultimately to
his arrest, were driven by desperation related to uncontrolled pain."

He noted that such cases "may increase the reluctance of
professionals to treat pain aggressively."

Portenoy wrote that despite the fact that Paey required high doses of
opioids, those doses were "clearly in the range used by pain
specialists in this country." He stressed that, "The number of pills
or milligrams of an opioid required for analgesia says nothing about
any of the negative outcomes associated with these drugs-including
abuse, addiction and diversion-and reference to the amount of drug as
evidence of these outcomes by regulators or law enforcement should
not be condoned."

Unfortunately, across the country, pain patients are being
undermedicated and doctors are going to prison because the Justice
Department refuses to believe this.

People profess to be experts about addiction because they have
personal experience with drugs or addicts; they think they know about
opioid drugs because they've watched a few episodes of E.R. or been
through DARE classes at school. The truth is that opioids are amongst
the safest drugs known to humanity -- when given appropriately, they
do not kill.

Unlike aspirin, Tylenol, Vioxx, Celebrex, Advil, Alleve and every
other known class of pain medications, opioids do not harm any organs
and there is no maximum dose once a person has become tolerant to
them. People need to educate themselves about the complexities of how
drugs, brains and settings interact before making policies about them
that send people like Richard Paey to prison.

Governor Crist, please, do the right thing and send Richard Paey home.

Maia Szalavitz is a senior fellow at the media watchdog group STATS.