After I wrote last year about Richard Paey, the wheelchair-bound patient who's been in physical agony for two decades, a lot of readers asked me what kind of monster could have prosecuted him for obtaining painkillers. If you watched "60 Minutes" Sunday, you could see for yourself.

Scott Andringa, the prosecutor in Florida who sent Paey to prison for 25 years, did not come off well on "60 Minutes," but he didn't look dementedly evil, either. He seemed exactly the way I've found him in interviews: earnest, conscientious, convinced he had done the right thing. That's why he scares me.

He's one of the many well-meaning public officials whose judgment has been so warped by the war on drugs that they can't see what they've become. Andringa, echoing the line of the Drug Enforcement Administration, has assured me he would never stop patients from getting medicine for their pain.

"I have the utmost respect for doctors who try to treat pain humanely and responsibly," he told me. "I am not a doctor. I have never claimed to be a doctor."

Yet there he was playing doctor on "60 Minutes" to explain why it was "reasonable" to infer that Paey was a drug dealer. There was no evidence that Paey had sold any of his painkillers (and agents had conducted surveillance of him and his wife for two months). But Andringa inferred that Paey must have been selling them because the prescriptions he received worked out to about 25 pills per day.

"One pill every hour, every day, for two years," Andringa told Morley Safer, as if this feat of math proved his case. It's the same mystic numerology you hear over and over from drug warriors like Karen Tandy, the head of the D.E.A., who prefers to focus on the number of pills prescribed without bothering with details like the patient's needs or the dosage.

Paey had no trouble explaining to me why he was taking 25 pills per day: his doctor cautiously gave him a variety of low-strength pills in order to avoid prescribing the kind of painkillers that tempt drug abusers and invite investigation from the D.E.A. Instead of taking a few high-strength oxycodone pills, Paey took a cocktail of pills containing low doses of oxycodone and other less effective pain killers like Tylenol.

As a result, the total daily dose of oxycodone in all those pills Paey took was less than what he could have gotten in a single high-strength OxyContin pill. And there are some chronic-pain patients who need 10 of those high-strength OxyContins every day because they, like Paey, have developed a tolerance to the drug over the years.

So there was no good medical reason to assume that Paey wasn't taking all those pills. In fact, he says he wasn't getting enough pain relief because of his doctor's fear of the D.E.A. Yet Andringa simply made his own medical diagnosis — too many pills — and proceeded to exploit the extraordinary leverage that prosecutors have been given over doctors and patients.

The typical approach is to put pressure on patients to turn on their doctors, but it can work the other way, too. Paey told me he was offered a deal by investigators: "They said if you're willing to testify against your doctor it would go a long way to having these charges go away." Paey refused, and then found himself facing hostile testimony from the doctor, who said he had not authorized the contested prescriptions.

After the doctor's credibility was challenged in court — he was contradicted both by his own words and by pharmacists who said he'd approved the prescriptions — the prosecutor came up with a mind-boggling new argument against Paey. Andringa told the jurors that even if they believed the doctor had prescribed the drugs, Paey should still be convicted because the doctor should never have written the prescriptions.

Andringa argued that the doctor wasn't practicing proper medicine — according to the prosecutor's standards — so the prescriptions were illegal and Paey shouldn't have filled them. By this logic, instead of listening to his doctor, Paey should have tried to anticipate what a prosecutor would prescribe for him.

I spoke to Andringa yesterday, after he'd watched "60 Minutes" and seen Paey's wife and the three teenage children whose father may die in prison. "I'm not thrilled about this case," he said. "I'm only proud that I did my job as a prosecutor." And self-appointed doctor.

Washington

The White House should hire an anthropologist.

Corporations have begun hiring anthropologists to help them improve product designs and interpret markets. And clearly, the Bush foreign policy team doesn't understand any of the markets where it is barging around ineptly trying to sell America and democracy.

The brand value of America has been in steady decline. The state of the union is sour but the state of the world is chilling, thanks to a hideously ham-handed Bush foreign policy crew that was once billed as a seasoned "dream team."

The more the White House tries to force-feed democracy to tempestuous parts of the world, the more it discovers that you may be able to spin and scare voters in the U.S., but the Middle East is not so easy to manipulate. W. believes in self-determination only if he's doing the determining. Fundamentalists in America like to vote for Mr. Bush, but elsewhere they're violently opposing him.

It's stunning that nearly four decades after Vietnam, our government could be even more culturally illiterate and pigheaded. The Bushies are more obsessed with snooping on Americans than fathoming how other cultures think and react.

One smart anthropologist reinforcing the idea that "mirroring" — assuming other cultures think like us — doesn't work would be a lot more helpful than all of the discredited intelligence agencies that are costing $30 billion a year to miss everything from the breakup of the Soviet Union to 9/11 to no W.M.D. to Osama's hiding place to the Hamas victory.

Bush officials keep claiming they couldn't have anticipated disasters — from the terrorist attacks to Katrina — even when they got specific warnings beforehand. Busy building up the fake nuclear threat in Iraq, they misplayed the real ones in Iran and North Korea. In London Sunday, Condi Rice admitted that all of our diplomats and spies were caught off guard by the Hamas win. "I've asked why nobody saw it coming," she said. "It does say something about us not having a good enough pulse."

Instead of paying the Lincoln Group millions to plant fake newspaper stories in Iraq, the Bush team might try reading real newspaper stories here. Instead of simply believing any fact that makes him feel self-important, the president might try reading history.

Like many other presidential candidates I've interviewed, W. said he liked Winston Churchill. But if he really had read Churchill, he would at least have understood that the Middle East never turns out the way you expect. Churchill, who called Iraq "an ungrateful volcano," would not have been surprised by the new WorldPublicOpinion.org poll showing that close to half of Iraqis approve of attacks on American forces.

The State of the Union is a non-event. But Bob Woodruff and his cameraman, Doug Vogt, being blown up by a roadside bomb has forced the media to focus on what the Bushies try to hide — all the injured and maimed coming home from Iraq.

Mark Landler's Times piece noted that the ABC journalists came to the hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, "on a military transport plane carrying 31 wounded soldiers — about a normal daily influx for this hospital."

As Denise Grady wrote in The Times, the survival rate in Iraq is higher than in other wars, but the wounds are multiple and awful: "combinations of damaged brains and spinal cords, vision and hearing loss, disfigured faces, burns, amputations, mangled limbs, and psychological ills like depression and post-traumatic stress."

The Oilman in Chief lecturing us last night, after five oblivious years, about being drunk on oil, now that Halliburton and Exxon are swimming in profits — Exxon's revenues were bigger than the gross domestic product of either Saudi Arabia or Indonesia — was rich.

A more honest TV moment was Christiane Amanpour labeling Iraq "a black hole." The "spiraling security disaster," she told Larry King, had robbed Iraqis of hope, "and by any indication whether you take the number of journalists killed or wounded, whether you take the number of American soldiers killed or wounded, whether you take the number of Iraqi soldiers killed and wounded, contractors, people working there, it just gets worse and worse."

But, hey, how could the Bushies have known that occupying a Middle East country — and flipping the balance of power from one sect to another — without enough troops to secure it could go wrong? Who on earth could predict the inevitable?