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Long Term Care

I see way too many of these stories. DEA intimidation has left the practice of pain medicine is such a sorry state that patient's have to choose between breaking the law or suffering debilitating physical distress. A lot of these sad tales seem to come from Florida, where apparently if you're Rush Limbaugh you can get away with illegally procuring medication, but if you're Richard Paey, a 45-year-old father of three who sits in a wheelchair, debilitated by multiple sclerosis and chronic pain from botched back surgery, you will receive a 25-year mandatory minimum sentence for forging prescriptions to treat your pain.

Despite months-long surveillance of Paey's activities, there was never any evidence that he resold the painkillers. Nonetheless, he is now charged with drug trafficking for self-medicating because his doctors would not or could not prescribe him appropriate levels of medication.

To be fair, prosecutors did offer a couple of rather generous (for a prosecutor that is) plea agreements, which he rejected on the firm belief he should not be charged with a crime for attempting to resolve his medical problems on his own. As this excellent editorial points out, neither he nor any chronic pain patients who have been forced to doctor shop and worse to get sufficient amounts of medicine belong in jail.

This is an abuse of our criminal justice resources. Paey is not a man who belongs in prison. What he and other pain patients need is a health care system that will respond to their affliction. (Paey now has a morphine pump in his back to dull the pain. His wife says, ironically, it provides him with more narcotics than he was getting from the Percocet, which is 98.5 percent Tylenol.)

We agree. Personally, I think the agency has outlived any usefulness it may have ever had, but that aside, it's clearly long past time for the DEA to get out of the business of harassing and imprisoning the chronically ill citizens of this country and their caregivers.