When Dominican, Dr. Sam Christian, left the United States to return home to practice professionally, he knew that sooner or later, he would have some public explaining to do about drug trafficking charges which had been filed against him in that country.
According to media reports in Ohio, the allegations occurred from December of 2009 until May 2011 and involved the controlled substances methadone, Xanax, Methylin and alprazolam.
The charges were dropped in February 2013 but according to a release from the Seneca County Prosecutor’s office in Ohio, the indictment was dismissed to allow additional time for the State Pharmacy Board to work with the prosecutor’s office on retaining a new physician to review medication records and to serve as an expert witness in the case.
The release said the expert witness who had been retained for the case was diagnosed with liver cancer and would be unable to testify. This left open the possibility that the charges could be reinstated in the future.
However Christian has described the charges as racially and politically motivated.
He explained in an interview with Dominica News Online, ”I was in a part of Northwest Ohio which is 98% white and very strongly republican. I became very active, not in a partisan way but out of conscience to help the working poor people who did not have insurance. What they call Obama Care or the Affordable Care Act was supposed to help. I had a Town House meeting and I have the newspaper account of that Town House meeting. It was a meeting in 2009 which was supposed to be for health care for the poor but instead, the newspaper portrayed it as (though) I was there to help OBama. So that was a very prejudicial headline that was put in the newspaper”
Dr. Christian said he also lead a demonstration to the Bowling Green State university and “I have a photograph where I’m standing in front the Ohio flag addressing the rally……. so it is very well proven that I was a very strong advocate for health care reform for the poor which was very unpopular among republicans.”
He said that as a result, he was targeted and charged with aggravated drug trafficking. “Aggravated drug trafficking is the charge that they use for drug Kingpins and Drug Lords and the irony of that is, I was the only physician in the area that was doing his best to help addicts overcome their disease,” he stated.
Of the two permits required for that practice, Dr. Christian said he was able to obtain the Federal permit ‘in quick time’ while state approval was deliberately delayed for two years during which time he had applied and paid twice.
“So basically what they did was to entrap me by allowing me to treat addicts which I did in full knowledge of the risk but to me, it was more important to save lives than to obey the law.”The doctor, who is now a licensed medical practitioner in Dominica, refers Dominica News Online to a video made of one of his patients, Jason Lebay.
“Jason Lebay came to my office and Jason Lebay said he and his wife that they were so frustrated with their drug addiction that they were planning to write their names on a bullet. In fact they had written their names on a bullet, carved their names on bullets and they were going to shoot themselves in the head and, they heard of some patients who had been to me and they decided to give it a chance and if that didn’t work they would carry out that threat.”
He said he was “stunned” by the revelation and proceeded to record the video with his Iphoine camera. He said that video ultimately assisted his case as Lebay would eventually kill himself when the programme was stopped and he (Lebay) was being pressured by the authorities to testify against Christian.
He maintains that the State of Ohio brought ‘trumped-up charges’ against him which could not be sustained, offering him a plea for eight years if he agreed to the charges. ”I am prepared to serve every last day of the 30 years that you are charging me with. I will not plea. We will go to trial and I will defend my action in a court of law. So the state came back and they offered further reduced charges. . . We said no, again. We will go to trial.”
Christian admits that he used methadone but says he did not wilfully commit a crime.
“I used methadone for pain medication for surgery. So, it has a dual purpose. So I did not knowingly or wilfully, commit a crime. I used a drug that had a dual purpose – number one, which is for regular pain medication and number two, that drug is also used in liquid form, for addiction treatment. I never used the medication in liquid form. I used the medication in pill form for pain control. So I was indirectly, treating patients for their pain associated with the addiction and so it would have been a matter for the courts,” he explained.
“I did not believe that I broke the law. I believe that I was helping people within the context of the law and I wanted to do more so I was applying for a permit to have a full fledged, above the board addiction treatment facility,” he argued.
Dr. Christian was defended by his brother Maryland based attorney Gabriel Christian and his associate Ed Leyden and his own son who was a senior in law school. He said they decided that they were going to fight the battle to the “last drop of blood”.“I think legally we destroyed them and as the time approached for the trial, there was a frenzy of activity. They had taken my passport and they had me under house arrest for eight months. At that last moment, they decided they will drop all my charges and they returned my passport and the pretext that they gave which is in the newspaper article was that my chief accuser, the medical expert witness was dying of cancer in which case he did die.”
However, Dr. Christian maintains that if all the work had already been done by that witness, they could have gotten another expert witness the following week. As far as reinstating the charges at some time in the future, he said his team found out that the state’s medical witness had himself been a drug addict who they believe was overcompensating by proving “how big and bad he is ” against doctors who were violating the state’s drug laws when he himself was a drug addict.
He makes a connection between his experience and the story of Shadrack, Meshach and Abednigo in the Bible, who were thrown into the fiery furnace and were not burned.
“I looked at it from a very spiritual standpoint that I went through the firey furnace in Ohio and they were unable to prevail”
Christian said the State of Ohio Medical Board did a thorough review of the case and in February or March this year renewed his licence to practice medicine in Ohio. “I can go back to Ohio today and practice. In fact I still help my patients in Ohio, if they need to have a prescription refilled.”
He said in Dominica, the medical board was given the information about his case upfront. ” They thoroughly researched it and basically they based their judgement on the judgement of the State of Ohio and the state of Ohio said I’m a licensed physician. I have done nothing wrong and on the basis of that Dominica granted me a license to practice in Dominica.”
He pointed out out that if the State of Ohio was really serious about charging him, they would have not returned his passport. Christian says he was prepared to take the matter to the media, the NAACP and make a federal case out of it. However the whole process had totally impoverished his family and seriously affected the health of both his wife and himself.
Instead he took his family’s advice and came back home to do what he had always wanted to do.
“My goal is to serve as a doctor in Dominica… so I’m very thankful for being delivered out of the clutches of the racist people in Ohio,” he said, ” I am very proud of what I did and I would do it again in a heart beat probably not in the same way. I would be wiser about it but saving the lives of people who are in the clutches of addiction has been the most satisfying thing that i’ve ever done and I would do it again in a heart beat.”
