The woes of chronic pain. Dealing with the pain, untrusting doctors, and federal drug charges:
“I don’t think anybody ever thought the war on drugs was going to mean a war on pain patients and their doctors, but that is in fact what it has meant,” said Siobhan Reynolds of the Pain Relief Network, an advocacy group that is helping with Paey’s appeal.
Paey is a 47-year-old former attorney and father of three who suffered a back injury in a 1985 car accident and since has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He was left in a wheelchair and constant agony.
Nothing blunted the pain — he has described it as feeling like his legs were on fire — except strong narcotics such as Percocet and Vicodin, which he bought from pharmacies in numbers that got the attention of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration.
Prosecutors said he was forging prescriptions and getting so many pills that he had to be selling them, even though investigators’ two-month surveillance turned up nothing. Paey said that because doctors in Florida were reluctant to prescribe medication in the amounts he required, he got his former doctor in New Jersey to send him undated prescriptions he could fill here.
Way to go, DEA. (via The DrugSpot)
