Patients Work to Save David Bockoff, MD

John P. Flannery, II, Esq., lawyer, long-time advocate for ending the government attacks on pain management and author of Pain in America, has written an emergency petition for 11 patients of Dr. David Bockoff to the United States Court of Appeals for the D. C. Circuit. The petition asks for a stay in the DEA proceedings against Dr. Bockoff where they suspended his certificate to write controlled drug prescriptions. The DEA Administrative Hearing is set to proceed tomorrow, Jan 19. The petition can be seen here:

Petition to Stay DEA Proceedings Against David Bockoff, MD

The information in this petition might seem amazing, considering the facts that the DEA even states in their filings that their review of Dr. Bockoff’s records showed no evidence that he was writing unauthorized scripts. Mr. Flannery also points out that the general search warrant served on Dr. Bockoff more than a year earlier was probably an impermissible general warrant that the Administrative Court refused to consider. Back in 2017,  DEA whiny weeny Joe Rannazzisi complained that the modification of 21 U.S.C 824(c)(2)(a)  stating that an order to show cause must include specific citations to any laws or regulations alleged to be violated “tied the DEA’s hands behind their back”.  This law is obviously being ignored by the DEA and the courts, and has been since it was written.

Why the DEA suspended Bockoff’s license is still not entirely clear, except it is a step in the indictment process to charge a doctor with a crime in order to confiscate all his assets. DEA agents searched his office in September, 2021 and confiscated the medical records of 240 patients. The petition states that the DEA returned digital copies of 200 of the charts confiscated, and then also supplied the remaining 40 later. The petition states that that action would seemingly affirm that those patients were also “lawfully treated”.  Wrong. The fact that the records were returned digitally and the hard copies remained in the hands of the DEA/DOJ is actually evidence that the DOJ intends to indict Dr. Bockoff in the near future. That will happen sooner than later, now that he has replied to the DEA with a show of cause.

Although a DEA notice of the suspension – signed by DEA administrator Anne Milgram — states that Bockoff posed “an imminent danger to the public health,” his license was not suspended until 14 months after the initial search, when he was accused of violating the Controlled Substances Act when treating five patients. Those allegations primarily deal with improper record-keeping and prescribing high doses of opioids that could potentially be diverted or abused. But there is no indication that any harm was caused to the five patients while under Dr. Bockoff’s care, or that they sold or abused the opioids he prescribed.

The petition states that the DEA is itself the “imminent danger” to the well-being of Dr. Bockoff’s patients. I especially draw your attention to Section III. The Administrative Court Misapprehended the Structure and Purpose of the CSA.  Mr. Flannery is a past US Attorney who admits to prosecuting CSA cases against organized crime. But in the course of his appointments, he recognized the importance of the CSA’s “permissible use of controlled substances to redress a patient’s illness and chronic pain.” i.e. the CSA protects the doctor’s prescribing to patients. He also points to the fact that “the wrongful suspension of the physician’s authority to prescribe is the impermissible and unlawful abandonment of a patient”.

So Who is David Bockoff, MD?

David Bockoff, MD, 74, is an internal medicine doctor in West Hollywood, CA who has practiced medicine for 53 years. There is no record of him facing any disciplinary action or complaints filed with the state medical board. He received his medical degree from Wayne State University School of Medicine in 1968, before medical standards required the recording of every minute detail of an office visit.  He is the poster child for targets of the DOJ to confiscate assets of elderly physicians because of their record keeping. He has been actively treating pain since 2001, is a member of the American Academy of Pain Medicine as well as other medical associations.

Dr. Bockoff says there was no warning about his suspension or the reasons for it. But there was—the DEA raid a year earlier. Any doctor in this country today that doesn’t recognize
that as an open notice that they are being targeted is hiding his/her head in the sand. Surely by now there is enough information out there to tell doctors what the record confiscation means.

The Drug Enforcement Administration suspended Bockoff’s license to prescribe controlled substances on November 1, 2022, claiming five of his patients were in “imminent danger” because he prescribed high doses of opioids and kept inadequate medical records. Since the DEA’s suspension, however, at least three of Dr. Bockoff’s patients have died — not because of his medical care, but from the lack of it.

Many pain patients have been forced to move from doctor to doctor as their current physician gets attacked by the government and their practice closed.  Believe me when I tell you this, folks. The deaths of these patients is one thing the government is counting on. I’ve recognized this since 2006 when I was first attacked.  The expendable populations—uninsured, government insured, disabled, elderly, and poor—are drains to the economy, and the government wants them dead. They made it clear back when Medicare was created, that they were trying hard to make it so difficult or undesirable for doctors, that they wouldn’t sign up. But being compassionate and not “in it for the money”, doctors did sign up. So now the government has figured out ways to get their money back from these blind physicians through criminal charges.

Many patients who have been forced to change doctors repeatedly have seen that there are fewer and fewer available to move to. So that creates tremendous anxiety. In the case of Dr. Bockoff, the result of his losing his DEA certificate brought about some patient suicides.  Now this is not a unique phenomenon.  I had 5 known patient suicides following the attack on me, and 10 more deaths I knew about that were either suicide or accidental overdose from self-treatment that never made the media reports. In the case of Dr. Bockoff, Pat Anson of Pain News Network wrote several posts on the deaths of Dr. Bockoff’s patients, so the word spread. In one case, there was a husband and wife, Danny and Gretchen Elliott from Georgia, who committed suicide on Nov 7, 2022. They were unable to find doctors in their area willing to treat Danny’s pain, so they traveled to California to see Dr. Bockoff. Four weeks later, Jessica Fujimaki died at her home, apparently from complications caused by pain and opioid withdrawal.

Ann Fuqua, a long-time pain patient advocate in Alabama, was also a patient of Dr. Bockoff, and had also been a patient of Dr. Forest Tennant who was attacked by the DEA in 2017. So far he has not been brought to trial, but he retired from practice as a result of the raid.

Pat Anson wrote an exposing post on the collaboration and corruption of the judiciary with the DOJ on Jan 5, 2023—Judge Won’t Stop DEA Despite Patient Deaths—when Judge Stanly Blumenfield Jr refused to grant a temporary restraining order to reverse the DEA’s suspension of Dr. Bockoff’s certificate, rejecting all of the complaints of the affected pain patients with the loss of their treatments as not as important as the DEA’s assertion that his record keeping was more concerning. In the case of one patient with chronic pancreatitis, one of the most painful medical conditions a person can have, Judge Blumenfeld dismissed her complaint, essentially saying that her medical records were more important than her ability to eat and work. Dr. Bockoff’s lawyer was Summer McKeivier, of Chapman’s Law Group.