This Couple Died by Suicide After the DEA Shut Down Their Pain Doctor
“There are millions of chronic pain patients suffering just like me," Danny Elliott wrote before ending his life. "Nobody cares."
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“There are millions of chronic pain patients suffering just like me," Danny Elliott wrote before ending his life. "Nobody cares."
KH
By Keegan Hamilton
DANNY AND GRETCHEN ELLIOTT, SEEN IN AN UNDATED PHOTOGRAPH. PROVIDED PHOTO.
It was a Tuesday in early November when federal agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration paid a visit to the office of Dr. David Bockoff, a chronic pain specialist in Beverly Hills. It wasn’t a Hollywood-style raid—there were no shots fired or flash-bang grenades deployed—but the agents left behind a slip of paper that, according to those close to the doctor’s patients, had consequences just as deadly as any shootout.
On Nov. 1, the DEA suspended Bockoff’s ability to prescribe controlled substances, including powerful opioids such as fentanyl. While illicit fentanyl smuggled across the border by Mexican cartels has fueled a record surge in overdoses in recent years, doctors still use the pharmaceutical version during surgeries and for soothing the most severe types of pain. But amid efforts to shut down so-called “pill mills” and other illegal operations, advocates for pain patients say the DEA has gone too far, overcorrecting to the point that people with legitimate needs are blocked from obtaining the medication they need to live without suffering.
One of Bockoff’s patients who relied on fentanyl was Danny Elliott, a 61-year-old native of Warner Robins, Georgia. In March 1991, Elliott was nearly electrocuted to death when a water pump he was using to drain a flooded basement malfunctioned, sending high-voltage shocks through his body for nearly 15 minutes until his father intervened to save his life. Elliott was never the same after the accident, which left him with debilitating, migraine-like headaches. Once a class president and basketball star in high school, he found himself spending days on end in a darkened bedroom, unable to bear sunlight or the sound of the outdoors.
“I have these sensations like my brain is loose inside my skull,” Elliott told me in 2019, when I first interviewed him for the VICE News podcast series Painkiller. “If I turn my head too quickly, left or right, it feels like my brain sloshes around. Literally my eyes burn deep into my skull. My eyes hurt so bad that it hurts to blink.”
After years of trying alternative pain treatments such as acupuncture, along with other types of opioids, around 2002 Elliott found a doctor who prescribed fentanyl, which gave him some relief. But keeping a doctor proved nearly impossible amid the ongoing federal crackdown on opioids. Bockoff, Elliott said, was his third doctor to be shut down by the DEA since 2018. As Elliott described it, each transition meant weeks or months of desperate scrambling to find a replacement, plus excruciating withdrawals due to his physical dependence on opioids, followed by the return of that burning eyeball pit of despair.
After the DEA visited Bockoff on Nov. 1, Elliott posted on Twitter: “Even though I knew this would happen at some point, I'm stunned. Now I can't get ANY pain relief as a #cpp [chronic pain patient.] So I'm officially done w/ the US HC [healthcare] system.”
Privately, Elliott and his wife Gretchen, 59, were frantically trying to find another doctor. He sent a text to his brother, Jim Elliott, saying he was “praying for help but not expecting it.”
Jim, a former city attorney for Warner Robins who is now in private practice, was traveling when he received his brother’s message. They made plans to talk later in the week, after Danny had visited a local physician for a consultation. In subsequent messages, Danny told Jim that Gretchen had reached out to more than a dozen doctors. Each one had responded saying they would not take him as a patient.
Jim recalled sensing in Danny “a level of desperation I hadn't seen before.” Then, on the morning of Nov. 8, he woke up to find what he called “a suicide email” from his brother. Jim called the local police department in Warner Robins to request a welfare check. The officers arrived a few minutes before 8:30 a.m. to find both Danny and Gretchen dead inside their home.
A police report obtained by VICE News lists a handgun as the only weapon found at the scene. Warner Robins police said additional records could not be released because the case is “still active.” The department issued a press release calling the deaths a “dual suicide.”
Jim shared a portion of a note that Danny left behind: “I just can't live with this severe pain anymore, and I don't have any options left,” he wrote. “There are millions of chronic pain patients suffering just like me because of the DEA. Nobody cares. I haven't lived without some sort of pain and pain relief meds since 1998, and I considered suicide back then. My wife called 17 doctors this past week looking for some kind of help. The only doctor who agreed to see me refused to help in any way. What am I supposed to do?”
At a joint funeral for Danny and Gretchen Elliott on Nov. 14 in Warner Robins, mourners filled a mortuary chapel to overflow capacity. Eulogies recalled a couple completely devoted to each other. They were doting cat owners, dedicated fans of Georgia Tech and Atlanta sports teams, and devout Christians, even as Danny’s chronic pain increasingly left him unable to attend church. In photos, the Elliotts radiate happiness with their smiles. But their lives were marred by pain: Gretchen was a breast cancer survivor. She married Danny in 1996, well after his accident, signing up to be his caregiver as part of their life partnership.
“It was a Romeo and Juliet story. They didn't want to live without each other,” said Chuck Shaheen, Danny’s friend since childhood and Warner Robins’ former mayor. “I understand the DEA and other law enforcement, they investigate and then act. But what do they do with the patients that are no longer able to have treatment?”
Shaheen and Danny both worked in years past for Johnson & Johnson, which is among the companies sued for allegedly causing the opioid crisis. Shaheen was also previously a salesperson for Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, another company blamed for spreading addiction. But Shaheen said Danny was not among those chasing a high—he, like others with severe chronic pain, was just seeking a semblance of normalcy.
“They're not doctor shopping,” Shaheen said. “They're not trying to escalate their dose. They're trying to function.”
Danny told me in 2019 that the relief he obtained from fentanyl didn’t make him feel euphoric or even completely pain free. He was using fentanyl patches and lozenges designed for people with terminal cancer pain, at extremely high doses that raised eyebrows whenever he was forced to switch doctors. But it was the only thing that worked for him.
“I call it turning the volume of my pain down from an eight or nine or even 10 sometimes to a six or a five,” he said. “The pain doesn't get much lower than that, but for me, that's almost pain free. It was the happiest thing I've ever experienced in my life.”
There are millions of chronic pain patients suffering just like me because of the DEA. Nobody cares
Gretchen’s brother, Eric Welde, choked up as he spoke with VICE News at the funeral about his perspective on the family’s loss: “In my mind, what the DEA is essentially doing is telling a diabetic who's been on insulin for 20 years that they no longer need insulin and they should be cured. They just don't understand what chronic pain is.”
So far, no criminal charges have been filed against Bockoff. In response to an inquiry from VICE News about the deaths of Danny and Gretchen Elliott, the doctor emailed a statement that said: “I am unable to participate in an interview except to say: Their blood is on the DEA’s hands.”
The DEA responded to a list of questions about Bockoff and the Elliotts’ suicides with an email saying Bockoff received what’s known as an “Immediate Suspension Order,” which according to public records is warranted in cases where the agency believes the prescriber poses “an imminent danger to public health or safety.” The DEA said local public health partners were notified in advance to coordinate under a federal program designed to mitigate overdose risks among patients who lose access to doctors. The agency offered no further comment.
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