Died by Suicide After DEA Shut Down Their Pain Doctor

This Couple Died by Suicide After the DEA Shut Down Their Pain Doctor As a reporter, some stories just stick with you. For me, one of those involved a chronic pain patient from Georgia named Danny Elliott, who for years had used large doses of the synthetic opioid fentanyl to treat his excruciating, migraine-like headaches.    Elliott’s case was unusual, as was his medical condition. In March 1991, he was nearly electrocuted to death in a home accident. Once active and outgoing, he found himself spending days on end in a darkened bedroom, unable to bear sunlight or the sound of the outdoors.     “If I turn my head too quickly, left or right, it feels like my brain sloshes around,” Elliott told me in 2019 when I first interviewed him for the VICE News podcast series Painkiller. “Literally my eyes burn deep into my skull. My eyes hurt so bad that it hurts to blink.”   Elliott eventually found a doctor who prescribed fentanyl, which offered him some relief. But amid the DEA’s efforts to shut down so-called “pill mills” and other illegal operations, keeping a doctor became nearly impossible. Elliott was supported by his wife Gretchen, who was not a pain patient but helped him navigate the healthcare system. After his latest doctor was shut down by the DEA earlier this month, Elliott and his wife Gretchen both died by suicide.    “There are millions of chronic pain patients suffering just like me because of the DEA,” Elliott wrote in a note he left behind. “Nobody cares.” I appreciate Keegan writing this true story because I am in this couple's pill jail except I have been threatened but not taken away. In pain but many times bearable. Not on Fentanyl and I'm glad because the government does not go by needs by how good the politics are about any issue. Why care about the millions in pain when you have thousands overdosing mainly because of other issues but not physical pain, the reason it was invented. But the families of those that die and the media are more than the millions of pain sufferers, besides it sounds good that the government is saving lives rather than the government is making addicts. Or just people in pain.Adam by  By Marcie Bianco, cultural critic Adam Gonzalez