Saad Sakkal, MD

Saad Sakkal, 72, is board certified in 4 specialties/subspecialties—internal medicine, endocrinology, geriatrics and obesity. He practiced in Hamilton, Ohio, with over 48 years of medical experience, On Aug. 14, 2020, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. He committed the ultimate unspoken crime: being foreign-born and practicing medicine in America.

So what did Dr. Sakkal do that was so criminal?  Absolutely nothing.  The media, however, printed normal behaviors as “bad”, in collusion with the government and their rogue behavior of creating crime where there is none.

Dr. Sakkal was indicted and arrested in June, 2018 in one of the largest national healthcare attacks by the government. This particular action involved 76 doctors, 23 pharmacists, 19 nurses, and other medical personnel across the nation. Dr. Sakkal was held in jail until his trial.  Although the Circuit Judge had set bail, the government appealed to the higher court, and got the decision reversed so that he stayed in jail and was unable to work on his defense. Slam, dunk for the prosecution. His lawyer, Richard Goldberg, was a standard white collar criminal defense attorney who obviously did not have the knowledge or expertise to defend against trumped up, non-criminal charges like doctors face today.

So Dr. Sakkal was convicted in April, 2019, of 30 counts of  “illegally dealing opioids” as the media reported it to be, and 6 counts of using someone else’s registration number.  That appears to be that he used a nurse practitioner’s prescription pad to write prescriptions for his patients.  That was probably a simple mistake, as prescription pads in an office all look alike. As long as he has a DEA certificate, he should be legally able to write a prescription on a napkin if he needed to. If laws pertaining to that have changed, it would be state-controlled, not federal. The jury acquitted him of one charge of using a nurse practitioner’s pad to write prescriptions so why not all of them? Because American’s believe that people are guilty if they are sitting in the defendant’s chair, and they believe the government’s false crimes.  This is something we need to end.

The “illegally dealing opioids” is on the books as “the illegal distribution of controlled substances outside the scope of a medical practice and with no legitimate medical purpose”.

Government Propaganda and Media Sensationalism

Basically Dr. Sakkal was convicted based on propaganda and media sensationalism. Here are the points made by the prosecution to convict him;

1. Prescribing combinations of drugs, even giving these combinations slang names to sound like they were illegal drugs. Terms like “Holy Trinity”, Prescriptive Speedball” and “Triple Threat Heaven”. But the prescriptive authority is the doctor’s—not the government’s—and these combinations of drugs have been safe and effective for 20 years.
2. He had a busy practice, so that patients sometimes were waiting long periods of time to be seen. Probably because there weren’t many doctors willing to treat pain in the area.
3. He performed inadequate physical exams “to identify and verify PATIENT’s complaints of pain”. Notice the prosecution even said “Patient” which is an immediate exemption of charges using the Controlled Substance Act. The CSA even states that a physical exam has to only be done once in the last 24 months. But now prosecutors are getting doctors convicted if they don’t do a physical exam every visit.
4. Pharmacists complained to him about his drug combinations, based on government propaganda, not true danger. Some pharmacies refused to fill his prescriptions, causing him and his patients to protest outside these pharmacies.
5. Supposedly causing the overdose death of his patient, Ashley Adkins, in 2016. But the level of her meds was double therapeutic, which means she probably committed suicide or was an abuser, which can’t be determined by a doctor. Dr. Sakkal did not “murder” her. Her sister even admitted she was a doctor hopper for drugs. But this death is what earned Dr. Sakkal a 20 year prison sentence.

 “Sakkal is responsible for the prescriptions that he wrote. All doctors are,” US Attorney Benjamin Glassman said. No, not all doctors. Just doctors prescribing controlled drugs.  This should be a warning to ALL doctors: Stop prescribing controlled drugs until all drugs are de-controlled.

The persons guilty of gross government misconduct are US Attorneys David M. Devillers and Benjamin Glassman and Assistant U.S. attorneys Timothy Oakley and Timothy Mangan, and U.S. District Judge Michael R. Barrett. When our legal profession does not follow the law, the country will enter anarchy.