McAlester doctor pleads guilty to federal charge
Feb. 8—A McAlester doctor indicted with prescribing a controlled substance for personal use agreed to surrender his medical license and faces up to six months in a federal prison as part of a plea deal.
Dr. Nelson Onaro, who owned and operated the Medical Clinic of McAlester on East Delaware Avenue, pleaded guilty Tuesday to one count of unlawful distribution of a controlled substance.
Onaro, 61, was charged in the Eastern District of Oklahoma after investigators said he wrote a prescription for 60 pills of Adderall to a staff member "with the understanding" that the staff member would fill the prescription and "bring the prescribed pills back to him for his personal use."
As part of the plea deal filed Tuesday following a hearing at the federal courthouse in Muskogee, Onaro agreed to surrender his Drug Enforcement Administration certificate of registration and to not "oppose revocation of his registration to dispense controlled substances."
The plea deal states Onaro also agreed to surrender and abandon any and all licenses he has to practice as a medical doctor in all states and to refrain from applying and seeking reinstatement of any licenses issued to practice medicine in the United States.
As part of the plea deal, Onaro faces up to six months imprisonment and any supervised release and fines the court imposes.
U.S. District Judge Ronald A. White will formally sentence Onaro at a later date following the completion of a presentence investigation report.
The doctor was originally indicted in 2020 following a December 2019 search warrant conducted at his office for 24 counts of unlawful distribution and dispensing of controlled dangerous substances.
Federal prosecutors later agreed to dismiss 18 of the indictments as part of a 2021 plea deal.
The original indictments accused him of distributing more than 60 kilograms of fentanyl, oxycodone, morphine, oxymorphone, and Adderall "outside the usual course of professional practice and without a legitimate purpose" between January 2018 and May 2019.
Onaro originally agreed to plead guilty to six counts of unlawful distribution and dispensing of controlled dangerous substances before withdrawing his guilty plea following the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Ruan v. United States.
White granted the request in July 2022 for Onaro's request to withdraw his guilty plea in five of the six counts.
Onaro's attorney argued the doctor would have never pleaded guilty to the charges if he had been able to sit in front of a jury and explain "regardless of some random California-based physicians' opinion" that he "genuinely thought he was treating his patients' alleged pain by and through his training."
"They told him they were in pain; Dr. Onaro then prescribed pain relieving medicine," his attorneys wrote. "Dr. Onaro did nothing but act as a doctor."
According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, the charges against Onaro arose from a long-term investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the United States Department of Justice Healthcare Fraud Strikeforce, and the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics.
