Take 32 Grams of Tylenol and Call Me in 25 Years

Reason ^ | December 13, 2006 | Jacob Sullum

[Neidermeyer]

You should live in a community where the drug trade and addiction touch every family with sorrow and misery before you denounce the drug war.

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At this point I would hazard a guess that the state has taken someone who could care for himself and made it impossible for him to leave prison ,,, he certainly has lost his home , his income will be confiscated to pay restitution to the citizens of Florida for him being an evil drug user... he will be unable to rent an apartment as his credit is ruined...all because of a stubborn DA attempting to force an innocent man to submit and kiss his ring..

[Neidermeyer]

The purpose of the war on some drugs is to provide employment opportunities for LEOs and attorneys, and human fodder for the pri$on-industrial complex. Period.

What a remarkably lame comment.

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Whats remarkably lame is that the above statement has been completely accurate for at least 20 years and that you can't see it. You should see the Hummers , tanks (yes Tanks! and APC's), helicopters and such that my local Sheriffs office has equipped itself with from illegal seizures and grants to fight the WOT.

[r9etb]

Whats remarkably lame is that the above statement has been completely accurate for at least 20 years and that you can't see it.

LOL! So the only reason for laws against drugs ("period") is to allow police departments to buy things like tanks?

Silly boy.

[Tolsti]

The question is not 'if drugs were legalized tomorrow' but is 'if drugs were legalized from your birth'.

Then yes, I'm sure I would've tried them, just as I drank and smoked tobacco. Also, people before they were illegal took them for a few decades, until the problems from refined illicit drugs caused.

[Neidermeyer]

Silly boy.

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Are you denying that the WO(s)D has not been the growth engine in law enforcement budgets? Are you saying the chief needs a few H1 hummers to cruise around in or field what amounts to a small army of SWAT officers...

My wife runs a large restaurant with a Patio Bar , she hires off duty LEO's for "extra duty enforcement" ,, it is EXTREMELY rare that a customer of her establishment is pulled over for DUI ...

The WO(s)D is a joke and of the dozens of cops I personally know at least half are corrupt in some way ,, including all that work for my wife.

If the WO(s)D wasn't a moneymaker for the police why do they continue with the "DARE" program , all reports show that it desensitizes kids to drugs and that kids taking the "course" are MORE likely to take illegal drugs ... the police are building a base for future arrests...

[r9etb]

I am suggesting to you that drug laws are not passed and enforced solely to increase LEO budgets.

Are you really going to suggest that, laws against meth (for example) are there only so the cops can buy things like tanks?

[El Gato]

How is somebody going to sentence a man to jail, just for trying to alleviate his pain?

The Judge will get his clerk to type up the order. Then he'll bang his gavel, and that will be that.

[ichabod1]

THey always pressure you to accept the plea deal by promising to come at you with all guns a'blazing if you insist on a trial.

[ichabod1]

THey always pressure you to accept the plea deal by promising to come at you with all guns a'blazing if you insist on a trial.

[Col Sanders]

...as a father who raised 2 children, I've been generally grateful that drugs were illegal, and grateful my kids didn't use 'em.

Here's the question you should ask yoursef - Did your children not use drugs because they were illegal or because they were raised better? Speaking from experience, if they were in high school in the last twenty years, it wasn't because they weren't available...

Col Sanders

[El Gato]

Exactly. Paey is in jail because that's where he wants to be, making a spectacle of himself.

So, he should have copped a plea to a crime he though himself not guilt of?

Remember that when BATFE breaks down your door, stomps your cat, slams your wife against the wall, and charges you with possession of an illegal/unregistered weapon, because you had some metal washers and a few hunks of metal tubing in your garage.

[Sam Cree]

"Did your children not use drugs because they were illegal or because they were raised better? Speaking from experience, if they were in high school in the last twenty years, it wasn't because they weren't available..."

You are quite correct, the drugs were widely available in high school, so their upbringing had to be a major factor. My thought is, though, that if society accepted drug use as a normal activity, then I wouldn't so easily have been bringing the kids up to avoid them.

I understand that society is able to frown on things that are legal and thus limit their use without laws and regulations. If we were to start all over again, without the prohibitions and notoriety of drugs, who knows whether kids would use them less than they do now or more? That question is beyond my ability to answer.

[supremedoctrine]

There are so many parallels in the official mind-set of the War on Terror and the War on Drugs, that it makes my head spin. The WOT is worse, though, because it suggests giving too wide a berth to people who could or would KILL us all, and the WOD giving too narrow a berth to people who, on the one hand, as in this case, just trying to manage their pain, or at worst giving themselves pleasure and peace in private. It is as though, frustrated by the various legal obstacles of prosecuting the truly dangerously guilty dealers/distributors, law enforcement then redoubles its efforts to prosecute the innocent, as if ANY victory, even a totally misconceived symbolic one, is better than nothing.

[El Gato]

The headline and rationalization that 98% of the substance was over-the-counter is the absurd part. Putting a narcotic in a legal substance does not alter the narcotic's illegality.

The substance isn't illegal, it's just available only by prescription. Big difference. The total amount of substance, oxycodone and acetaminophen combined, is what allowed them to charge him with trafficking rather than just unlawful possession. The point being he didn't have enough of the illegal substance to be charged with trafficking if the legal substance had not been mixed in. I very much doubt the authors of the law and/or regulation, intended for non controlled substances to be counted when determining the amount. Of course the use of a amount to establish the presumption of trafficking is somewhat questionable as well, especially so if that presumption or the amount is a matter of regulation rather than statute law.

[Riverman94610]

When you actually ARE in pain,morphine and the other opiates simply numb the pain.Its when you are NOT in any pain that the drug and others like it are "Good".
And,yeah,I've taken such substances under BOTH conditions at various times in my life.

[El Gato]

How many pills is 32 grams?

The article says his prescription of 100 tablets was 33 grams.

each of Paey's 100-pill Percocet prescriptions, weighing in at 33 grams,

[rednesss]

I'm guessing here that some people flunked math.

18,000 x even a small, minute amount of oxycodone in each pill still adds up to 4 grams or whatever their threshold level is (each pill would only need to have .00022 grams of opiate to equal 4 grams i.e. a dust mote). This guy single handedly boosted Merks quarterly profit for 8 straight quarters.

Just for visualization, I was reading that a 1 liter jar can hold about 240 jelly beans (see any of those guess how many jelly beans are in this jar to win $100 prizes). Now assuming that the pills were say half the size of a standard jelly bean, that would mean that he bought enough pills to fill roughly (38) 1 liter jars.

[zeebee]

he didn't have enough of the illegal substance to be charged with trafficking if the legal substance had not been mixed in

I see. Then it seems any decent lawyer can get the trafficking part dropped since he indeed did not possess enough of the illegal substance to warrant (pun unintended) the charge.

[Lx]

I just had surgery a couple of months ago. In the recovery room they kept pumping me full of morphine and Fentanyl because I had a headache that was as bad as the surgery pain. They couldn't give me Ibuprofen or Tylenol so they just kept giving me opiates until I went up to the regular ward floor. They finally gave me some Norco (hydrocodone and Tylenol) that helped my headache. It turned out that the morphine was keeping the headache going. The switched me to diluadid (sp?) and my headache went away. I can't believe the doctor told you that (I'm not saying you're lying, it just sucks that they told you that because at least here in CA it's not true). Unless it's a state law, I got morphine and pain meds around the clock.

The bad part was when I originally broke my leg 20 some years ago, I was on painkillers every 4 hours for pain for 5 months. Then they kicked me out of the hospital with nothing and didn't wean me off of them. Narcotic withdrawals and excruciating pain, ahhh good times. Nowadays, they're a little less ruthless.

[TheSarce]

Bernie-McCabe-at-work Ping.