Problems with "helpful" scsi drives

I'm trying to use cdparanoia to read images from a Hitachi GF-2050  
DVD-RAM scsi drive. Things work great if the disc is in decent shape,  
but when the disc has been scratched up, the drive/scsi card/scsi  
driver seems to try really hard to not let the application see that.  
cdparanoia seems to see the problems as simple scsi timeouts, and  
merrily keeps trying to reset the scsi bus, thinking things will get  
better.

How to I make cdparanoia give up in such situations? --never-skip=1  
seems to have no effect.