Blurring The Lines Between Reality and Television
December 8, 2006
Suddenly the persecution of House doesn’t seem so far-fetched.
In a mind-boggling act of sadistic legal legal buck-passing, the Florida District Court of Appeals upheld a 25 year mandatory minimum sentence for a Florida man convicted of “drug trafficking” for possessing his own pain medication.
He has no prior criminal record– in fact, he’s an Ivy League law school graduate. He has not one, but two extensively documented and excruciatingly painful chronic disorders: multiple sclerosis and chronic back pain due to an injury suffered in a car accident that was treated by a surgery that made matters worse. (This surgery was so egregiously misguided that TV exposes and numerous large malpractice judgments resulted). Paey has already been in prison for three long years.
In prison– a place not exactly known for medical kindness– he has been given a morphine pump, which now daily gives him similar or higher doses of medication than he was convicted of possessing illegally.
So why is he serving 25 years? Tipped off by a pharmacist ignorant of pain management, Florida authorities decided that the doses of painkillers he was receiving were so high that he had to be selling the drugs, not taking them. They found no evidence of this, however, even after putting him under surveillance for months.
But they did manage to convince his New Jersey doctor– who Paey claims authorized his prescriptions– to testify that, in fact, Paey was forging them. The doctor was told that he would face a similarly lengthy prison sentence for trafficking if he’d authorized such high doses for a patient who had moved from New Jersey to Florida.
