If you or someone you are close to suffers from chronic pain, you know how debilitating it can be. Chronic pain prevents you from living life normally – if at all. For pain patients, access to the drugs and medications they need is the difference between participating in life and being shut in their homes, just trying to deal with the pain. As crack downs on certain pain medications in the United States increase in an effort to stop the opioid crisis, many legitimate pain patients are being left with no options. Sadly, this couple took their own lives when their access to their meds was cut off by the crack downs.
Pain Patients Are Committing Suicide Due To Pain Med Crack Downs
In March 1991, Danny Elliot of Warner Robins, Georgia, was nearly electrocuted to death. The water pump he was using to drain his flooded basement malfunctioned, sending high voltage shocks through his entire body for nearly 15 minutes. Thankfully, his father found him and saved his life before the shocks killed him. Unfortunately, the shocks left Elliot with debilitating, migraine-like headaches ever since.
“I have these sensations like my brain is loose inside my skull,” Elliott told VICE in 2019.“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.” (1)
Like many pain patients, Elliot had to go from doctor to doctor trying to find someone who was able and willing to help him. After more than 10 years of suffering, he finally found a doctor who prescribed him fentanyl. While the drug doesn’t completely rid him of pain, it takes it from a nine or 10 on the scale down to a five or six. The problem is that federal crack downs meant that his doctors kept getting shut down. Each time it is harder and takes longer to find a doctor that can prescribe him what he needs.
He Simply Couldn’t Take Any More
His third doctor was Dr. David Bockoff, a pain doctor in Beverly Hills. In November of last year, the DEA came in and suspended Dr. Bockoff’s capacity to prescribe controlled substances, including fentanyl. Elliot was desperate, and so was his dedicated wife, who he married after his accident and who spent their marriage taking care of him. Feeling completely hopeless, the couple both took their own lives together, not wanting to go through the painful process of searching for another doctor only to get turned down again.
“I just can’t live with this severe pain anymore, and I don’t have any options left,” he wrote in his suicide note. “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?”
Eulogies and condolences poured in for the couple before, during, and after their funeral. Many people turned up to pay their respects and also to speak out against the severe crack downs by the DEA that are making it impossible for actual pain patients to access the medications that they need.
“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?”
What Are The Doctors Saying?
In this case, VICE reports that so far no charges have been made against Dr. Bockoff against the family regarding Elliot and his wife’s deaths. Dr. Bockoff himself has spoken out. While he is unable to comment much due to confidentiality and legal constraints, he has said publicly that this couple’s deaths are on the DEA’s hands.
The DEA has also responded to VICE’s questions. They say that they shut down Dr. Bockoff because they believed that the types and quantities of medications that he was prescribing for his patients posed a danger to public health and safety. Unfortunately, there is not much data on suicides for chronic pain patients. Some experts, based on their own research, have estimated that hundreds and even thousands of chronic pain patients have taken their own lives because DEA shutdowns have taken away their access to the medications that they need to live. (2)
Sources
- “This Couple Died by Suicide After the DEA Shut Down Their Pain Doctor.” Vice. Keegan Hamilton. November 30, 2022.
- “Taper Paper Compendium Update December 16, 2022.” Stefan Kertesz. Stefan Kertesz, MD, MSc. June 9, 2022.