aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, April 29, 2006

Paey v Limbaugh

I’ve posted a * couple * times * about Richard Paey, who’s worth remembering as we read about Limbaugh’s drug plea.

Paey, a wheelchair-bound car-crash victim, was prosecuted in the same state, Florida, for the same use of prescription painkillers, as Limbaugh but with starkly different outcomes. Paey’s serving a mandatory 25 year sentence. Limbaugh gets off scot-free.

Why didn’t Paey take a plea deal? I quote from one of the three columns John Tierney has written on his imprisonment:

Scott Andringa, the prosecutor in the case, acknowledged that the 25-year mandatory penalty was harsh, but he said Mr. Paey was to blame for refusing a plea bargain that would have kept him out of jail.

Mr. Paey said he had refused the deal partly out of principle—‘’I didn’t want to plead guilty to something that I didn’t do’’—and partly because he feared he’d be in pain the rest of his life because doctors would be afraid to write prescriptions for anyone with a drug conviction.

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. Whether these efforts have done any good is debatable (and a topic for another column), but the harm is clear to the millions of patients who aren’t getting enough medicine for their pain.

Paey now gets from the prison the same quantity and quality of pain medication he was arrested for. Here’s a roundup of news reports on Richard Paey and the War on Pain Patients.

Can we expect Limbaugh to speak out against the victimization of patients and doctors by a law enforcement apparatus that refuses to see pain killers as medicinal relief from suffering, preferring instead to arrest sufferers as criminal narcotics traffickers? Don’t hold your breath.