A newly elected district attorney in Tennessee said during her campaign she would consider prosecuting teachers and librarians who stock LGBTQ books in libraries, but ultimately called on school boards to ban books from schools. 

A video taken earlier this year depicts Coty Wamp, the former public defender of Hamilton County, in a forum-like setting responding to a long-winded question about what can be done about books identified as inappropriate by Moms for Liberty, a national far-right group with nearly 100,000 members across 37 states. The organization has called books about LGBTQ youth obscene and has run nationwide campaigns to have them removed from the shelves of school libraries and classrooms. 

“I think that there’s going to come a time in some of these books where it crosses a criminal line,” Wamp says in the video. “It’s called contributing to the delinquency of a minor.” The video went viral after Wamp's victory on Tuesday. 

According to Tennessee state law, an adult contributing to or encouraging the delinquency or unruly behavior of a child is considered a misdemeanor offense. 

“I do think there’s a fine line where all of a sudden, obviously, if a teacher is handing a child something that I think is sexually explicit, I think we’ve got to look at criminal statute and determine if the elements are there, if it meets every element of a criminal offense,” she says in the video. “But man, this begins and ends with our school board. So, because even if I prosecute somebody for this book, there’s still all the other ones that our school board’s going to have to deal with.” 

In an attempt to walk back the comments she made in the video, Wamp denied to Motherboard saying she would prosecute a librarian or teacher for the material contained in books in their schools. She previously spoke to Jezebel and also tried to walk back her comments.

“I am not and never will be a proponent of adults giving elementary-age children any type of material that is sexually explicit,” Wamp told Motherboard. “I ran for DA in a county with a violent crime problem. I will focus on that and let the school board focus on what materials our children have access to.”

The former public defender told Motherboard the footage could have been captured by an attendee of one of dozens of her campaign events for conservative groups across East Tennessee over a 14-month period. But context clues—namely the whiteboard behind her with upcoming dates for school board candidate meet-and-greets for the local Hamilton County chapter of Moms for Liberty—suggest that it was a local Moms for Liberty group meeting in March 2022. 

The video also shows someone in the audience handing Wamp a book from a Hamilton County elementary school. The book is called It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health written by Robie Harris and illustrated by Michael Emberley. It was first published in 1994 for preadolescent children undergoing puberty and has been updated several times over the years to reflect modern sexual health vocabularies, LGBTQ representation, and advances in contraception methods, among other topics.

As Wamp flips through it, she makes note of the “peddling, touching, kissing, and sexual intercourse.”

“Yeah, I don’t know how it’s not contributing to the delinquency of a minor,” which is a crime, she says after an audience member tells her to “look at the sex positions” in the book. 

“I’ll say this, though. It comes for me as a lawyer as somebody who’s prosecuted these cases. You also have to determine who, at the end of the day, is responsible for putting these books in the school,” Wamp says in the video. “We have to talk about it. And the bottom line is the school board needs to remove it from the schools. I mean, I don’t see another option.” 

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It’s worth pointing out that Generation Alpha children are starting puberty earlier than children of previous generations. Reports have found that Alpha children born female are showing signs of developing breasts, one of the first signs of puberty, as early as age 6 or 7. Scientists are studying how obesity, chemicals and stress may impact girls who go through earlier puberty, but little remains definitively known about how race and environmental factors may impact adolescent development. 

Carolyn Foote, a school librarian and member of #FReadom Fighters—a Texas-based group advocating for students, teachers, and librarians—says libraries have books about puberty to correlate with many states’ sex education lessons. 

“Libraries are places of voluntary inquiry with thousands of books,” Foote told Motherboard. “No one is asking any child to pick a particular book or handing each child the same book. We respect the needs of each different child and family.”

The video comes amid a nationwide conservative backlash that has made libraries into a battleground for LGBTQ people and their allies, people seeking abortions, and other vulnerable groups. Conservative groups have called to ban books by queer and Black authors, and armed far-right groups such as the Proud Boys have disrupted drag queen story hours and other LGBTQ programming at libraries across the U.S. Librarians themselves have also found themselves targets of harassment and criticism after featuring books about LGBTQ youth. 

Moms for Liberty has been a key strategist responsible for the rise in book bans. The national organization has been seeking to flip seats on school boards, remove books with contents that go against their ideologies, and advocate for policies that make these efforts easier to achieve. 

Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education programs at PEN America, said that outrage over books in school libraries should be grounds to hold librarians accountable has become a regular talking point for politicians making stump speeches. 

“This is a very confusing situation because the librarians are duty-bound to uphold the First Amendment, to consider how they make books accessible to people that contain information that people might want to read and the whole concept of the library is one where people have a degree of freedom to choose what they read,” Friedman told Motherboard. “One of the challenges here and what’s really the case of a book like this is either someone is old enough to understand the book and read it, or they pick it up and they might be reading it but they don’t understand it.” 

Friedman says in watching this video, that it’s worth questioning why Wamp, Moms for Liberty and other groups believe sex education information is so taboo that it could result in something as extreme as prosecution for a librarian. As the school year begins across the country, librarians and teachers are pointing out that the pattern of book banning has evolved from last year to school districts changing access for students either through school board-approved policies or unwritten policies regarding books in classrooms and in school libraries. 

The recent efforts to ban LGBTQ-inclusive books from schools and public libraries has been spearheaded by a number of relatively small conservative groups, many of which didn’t exist a year ago. 

That’s according to a new report from the free expression nonprofit PEN America, which details the role at least 50 advocacy organizations play in censoring LGBTQ-themed books in classrooms and libraries across the country. 

Key findings from the report, “Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools,” show that many of these groups first went public in 2021, and many of the book ban cases counted by PEN America can be linked in some way to the 2,532 instances of individual books that have been banned between July 2021 and June 2022. 

Among the 1,648 unique titles at the center of these bans, PEN found that 81% of titles explicitly address LGBTQ themes or have protagonists or prominent secondary characters who identify as LGBTQ or non-white. 

Johnathan Friedman, director of free expression and education at PEN America and co-author of the report said that the field of activity is dynamic, growing, and changing. 

“Where we found groups named and associated with bans, that's where we logged it for our purposes,” Friedman, director of free expression and education at PEN America and report co-author, told Motherboard. “Sometimes that included smaller, local, and predominantly online Facebook groups. In other cases, it involved national groups that have supported a range of local partners.”

The groups identified in the report range in size and scale, from local Facebook groups like the Jamestown Conservatives, who successfully swayed votes on a public ballot measure to renew funding for the Patmos Library, to national organizations like Moms for Liberty, which have established over 200 chapters across the country. 

The report found evidence of at least 38 state, regional, or community groups unaffiliated with national organizations and at least eight national organizations with a combined count of at least 300 local or regional chapters. Aside from Moms for Liberty, the PEN America report lists US Parents Involved in Education, No Left Turn in Education, MassResistance, Parents’ Rights in Education, and Mary in the Library as national organizations pushing challenges against books across the US.

PEN America said the actions of these groups can be “linked directly” to at least 20% of the book bans enacted in the 2021-22 school year. Those actions include members making statements at school board meetings, submitting lists of books for formal reconsideration, or filing paperwork to challenge books with school districts. 

Despite the success of these groups, book bans are overwhelmingly unpopular with the vast majority of Americans. According to a recent poll by the non-profit EveryLibrary Institute, 95 percent of Democrats, 80 percent of independents, and 53 percent of Republicans are against book bans, and 75 percent said they would consider book bans when voting in the November mid-term elections. Only 8 percent of respondents said they believed “there are many books that are inappropriate and should be banned.”

John Chraskta, executive director of the EveryLibrary Institute, a nonprofit that helps build voter support for libraries, said the PEN America report offers an unimpeachable dataset. Elaborating on the report’s findings, Chraskta said that homegrown nationalists and entrepreneurial activists are mobilizing independent of national groups but are employing similar methods like swarming school board meetings, demanding libraries implement book rating systems, using inflammatory language about “grooming” and “pornography,” and filing criminal complaints against school officials, teachers and librarians. 

“What the national groups are doing is they're providing very easy-to-use lists and they’re providing very effective coaching and guidance on how to interrogate a public or school library database,” Chraskta told Motherboard. “They’re providing technical assistance that’s easy to adopt whether you’re a spontaneous actor, political actor or part of an organization of political actors.” 

The report also makes note of how state lawmakers and executive branch officials are using book ban talking points for political gain. The report distinguishes between groups espousing Christian nationalist political views with those that have mission statements oriented toward reforming public schools to offer more religious education. 

“These people are part of a movement that is very racist at its core,” Chraskta added. “It’s misogynistic, and it’s looking to recriminalize homosexuality, and that’s the most pernicious part of it.” 

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.

Data on suicides by chronic pain patients is scarce, but experts who study these cases estimate that hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Americans have taken their own lives in the aftermath of losing access to prescription opioids and other medications. Some cases have occasionally made news, like a woman in Tennessee who was arrested for buying a gun to assist her husband’s suicide after his doctor abruptly cut down on his medication used to treat back pain.

Starting around 2016, a backlash to prescribing opioids began to spread across the U.S. healthcare system, sparked in part by guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that prompted scrutiny of patients on doses equivalent to over 90 milligrams of morphine per day.

The National Committee for Quality Assurance, which develops quality metrics for the healthcare industry, has implemented its own 90 milligram threshold, and patients over that baseline count as receiving “poor care,” regardless of their dose history. In practice that means doctors have strong incentives to reduce the dosage, even for someone like Elliott, who had been taking the same prescription for years, and even if it’s not necessarily in the best interests of the patient.

Since 2018, the CDC has developed an initiative called the Opioid Rapid Response Program, which is supposed to assist when doctors lose the ability to prescribe pain medication. Stephanie Rubel, a health scientist in CDC’s Injury Center who leads the program, said when the DEA visited Bockoff’s office, “a healthcare professional was onsite in case any patients arrived for their appointments.”

Rubel, in a statement sent via the CDC’s press office, said everyone from the county health department to Medicare providers were alerted about the DEA’s action against Bockoff. But Rubel also noted that the CDC program “does not provide direct assistance to patients affected by a disruption, including referrals or medical care.” In fact, the only help that patients like Elliott received was a flier with a list of local emergency rooms they could visit if—or when—they started experiencing withdrawal.

“Any loss of life due to suicide is one too many,” Rubel said. “This case is heartbreaking and emblematic of the trauma, pain and danger many patients face when these disruptions occur and is why ORRP [Opioid Rapid Resposne Program] has been developed to help prepare state and local jurisdictions to respond when disruptions in care occur.”

Dr. Stefan Kertesz, a professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Heersink School of Medicine, had been acquainted with Danny since 2018, meeting him in another moment of crisis. Danny’s doctor at the time had just been arrested by the DEA, and Kertesz, who conducts research and advocates on behalf of chronic pain patients, stepped in to help. It was difficult, Kertesz told VICE News, because “the doses he was on were orders of magnitude higher than most doctors are familiar with.”

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

Danny ultimately found another doctor but was forced to change once more before landing with Bockoff in Beverly Hills. Kertesz cautioned that he was not familiar with the details of Bockoff’s case, but said the doctor was known for treating “opioid refugees” who’d been turned away from other physicians. Danny and his wife would fly from Georgia to Los Angeles for appointments, and other patients with unique circumstances came from around the country.

Bockoff had practiced medicine in California for 53 years with no record of disciplinary action or complaints with the state medical board, according to the Pain News Network, which reported the DEA searched the doctor’s office about a year ago. The DEA took, but eventually returned, some patient records. 

Asked about the DEA’s handling of the Bockoff case, Kertesz replied: “Honestly, it seemed to me like bombing a village. It could be they think they're getting the bad guy, but it's not a precision munition. Whoever is launching the bomb has to consider the collateral damage.” 

Clinical research on chronic pain patients is complicated, Kertesz said, but “a lengthy series of studies confirm that there is a strong association between opioid reduction or stoppage and suicide.” While reducing opioid intake can be helpful for some people, he said, Danny and other longtime users with medical needs should not be forced to go cold turkey.

“Even if you believe the doctors did something wrong, I can't find somebody who believes all those patients should die,” Kertesz said. “And if we agree they shouldn't all die, then why would we act in such a way that we know we're going to massively increase their risk of death?”

Another former Bockoff patient was Kristen Ogden’s husband Louis. Much like Gretchen Elliott, Ogden has supported her husband for years as he’s battled chronic pain caused by a rare condition similar to fibromyalgia. And like the Elliotts, the Odgens have dealt with the fallout of DEA actions that triggered desperate searches for new doctors.

The Ogdens live in Virginia and had just landed in California for a doctor’s appointment when they got the news about the DEA’s visit to Bockoff’s office. They found the emergency room flier to be a slap in the face.

“They probably look at you as an addict and they recommend that you do whatever you can to get off these medications,” Ogden said. “They're not there to help us at all.”

Ogden is the co-founder of an advocacy group called Families for Intractable Pain Relief, and she started reaching out to her network, including other patients. She spoke to Danny by phone and described him as sounding “consumed by this dread of what he fully expected was going to be the next step for his life—months of untreated pain.”

Honestly, it seemed to me like bombing a village

Ogden said she’s personally called at least 10 doctors seeking treatment for her husband but to no avail. Other Bockoff patients are in the same boat, she said, and nobody she knows has been able to find another specialist willing to continue with a similar course of care.

Dr. Thomas Sachy of Gray, Georgia, was the first doctor to prescribe Danny fentanyl and remained his physician until the DEA raided his practice in 2018. Federal authorities have alleged Sachy had his office set up like a “trap house” with firearms on the premises. Sachy is charged with “issuing prescriptions not for a legitimate medical purpose and not in the usual course of professional practice.” Two employees and Sachy’s 84-year-old mother, who worked at his clinic, were also initially charged but their cases have since been dropped.

Sachy agreed to plead guilty in the case to avoid a possible life sentence but later withdrew the plea. He maintains his innocence. His trial is scheduled to start in January in federal court in Georgia. Wearing an electronic ankle monitor to track his location while out on bond, Sachy attended the Elliotts’ funeral service in Warner Robins, where he sat for an interview with VICE News.

Federal prosecutors have accused Sachy of prescribing opioids that contributed to the deaths of patients. Sachy in turn blames the DEA for the suicides of two patients who took their lives in the aftermath of the raid.

“My patients weren't young drug addicts off the street,” Sachy said. “They were middle-aged and older with health problems. And the thing about pain, chronic pain, and the anxiety and the suffering that comes with it, it wears you down.”

Similar to what happened with Bockoff, after the DEA visited Sachy’s office in Georgia, the only resource made available to patients was a list of local pain management facilities and resources for opioid withdrawal, including emergency rooms. Sachy scoffed at the idea of his patients visiting an ER for help: “They'd look at them like they were insane or criminals or both.”

“It's absolutely frustrating,” Sachy said. “It's absolutely heartbreaking. It sucks. It destroys everything you think a physician should do and be and should be able to accomplish. It’s all taken away. And it's just utter helplessness.”

Among the Elliott family and other pain patients, helplessness and anger remain common sentiments. Ogden said her husband and other chronic pain patients have spoken with an attorney about the possibility of a lawsuit against the DEA.

As a lawyer who worked for years in public office, Jim Elliott knows civil litigation against the government can be an uphill battle. He said the family is still deciding how to move forward in response to the deaths of Danny and Gretchen.

Jim emphasized that “it wasn't as if pain medication made Danny's life great.”

Fentanyl just made the pain bearable. And when that was taken away, Danny saw no future.

“He was taking a high level of pain medication but he wasn't an addict and he wasn't trying to get high or anything,” Jim Elliott said. “He was just trying to live a life. And they closed every door for people like that.”

If you are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

Update: A previous version of this story said the DEA did not take records from their initial search on Bockoff’s office. It has been updated to reflect some records were taken, and returned.