Virginia Tech Killer and Prescription Drugs

[enquirewithin]

Reading about this tragedy this caught my eye:

Prescription medications said to be related to treatment of psychological problems were found among Mr. Cho’s effects, but officials did not specify what drugs they were.

New York Times

The New York Times also reported that prescription drugs used to treat psychological disorders were found among his effects. Almost every perpetrator of a mass shooting in the United States in recent years had either been on prescription drugs or had stopped taking them shortly before erupting in violence.

The Independent

Intersting. I have read about SSRIs, for example, causing psychotic reactions in users-- or is it just that people likely to become killers will tend to seek medicatation?

[Beeker]

When I was trialed on the new drug Prozac in 1989 for 3 months and taken off cold turkey I tried to kill myself within days.

the last two I trialed caused schizophrenia and delusional psychosis within weeks.

It's very likely that all suicides and mass murders of the young or a large percentage stopped their meds cold turkey.

[enquirewithin]

A Killer Cocktail - Prozac Madness

By FRED GARDNER

http://counterpunch.com/gardner04212007.html
The lard-assed cops at Virginia Tech spent two hours interrogating the wrong suspect and failed to prevent the massacre. Now they're "investigating." What is there to investigate - which brand or brands of anti-depressant Seung Hui Cho was taking?

A lonely, picked-on boy was given Prozac (or one of its chemical analogs) like Kip Kinkel in Oregon, like Eric Harris in Colorado This is not a scoop, America: Prozac causes horrible, bizarre flip-outs. It is a fact that has been known for 20 years and that Eli Lilly and the other manufacturers of "selective" serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) have relentlessly denied and are still trying to suppress.

On the very day after the shootings at Virginia Tech, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study challenging the "black box" warning that the Food and Drug Administration had finally attached to Prozac in October, 2004. "Antidepressants Get a Boost For Use in Teens" read the Wall St. Journal headline. "Despite Warnings on Labels, Study says Benefits Outweigh Risk of Suicidal Tendencies."

The New York Times ran its account of the new pro-Prozac study on the page facing the obituaries of students and faculty members killed at Virginia Tech! "Scales Said to Tip in Favor of Antidepressant Use in Children -A risk of suicidal thoughts is found to be more than offset." You'd think that 33 deaths would more than offset it back.

Evidence that Prozac induces suicidal ideation and actions emerged when the drug was in clinical trials in Germany in the mid-1980s. The German findings were misrepresented to the FDA by a Lilly employee named Joachim Wernicke. U.S. marketing approval was granted in December, 1988, with no warning required. After a drug is marketed here in Guinea Pig Nation, only a very small fraction of the adverse events brought on by the drug get reported. Patients have to tell their doctors who then have to file paperwork with the manufacturers who then have to voluntarily tell the FDA that their products are dangerous.

Among the adverse events brought on by Prozac soon after it hit the market were numerous suicides and homicides, some of which resulted in legal action by the victims or survivors. Lilly's strategy was to conceal the trend by settling every case out of court. One of the first to capture national attention involved Joseph Wesbecker, a Louisville, Kentucky printing press operator who, on Sept. 14, 1989, killed eight co-workers with an AK-47 and injured a dozen others before committing suicide. Wesbecker had been prescribed Prozac five weeks before and his psychiatrist, noting that Wesbecker had become "very, very agitated," told him to stop taking it on Sept. 11. Victims who survived the shooting, relatives of those who died, and members of Wesbecker's family subsequently sued Eli Lilly, charging that the company "knew or should have known that users of Prozac can experience intense agitation and preoccupation with suicide, and can harm themselves or others."

In February, 1990 psychiatrists Martin Teicher and Jonathan Cole and nurse Carol Glod published "Emergence of intense suicidal preoccupations during fluoxetine treatment" American Journal of Psychiatry, It described six patients who developed "intense, violent suicidal preoccupations" within two to seven weeks of starting treatment with Prozac. The authors estimated that between 1.9 and 7.7 percent of Prozac users would develop suicidal obsessions. Teicher and his co-workers subsequently reported that Prozac patients were "at least three-fold more likely to develop new suicidal ideation" than patients treated with the older antidepressants, and that patients were also more likely to develop suicidal thoughts for the first time ever while taking Prozac.

Lilly responded, "Our experience does not show a cause and effect relationship between our products and suicidal or violent thoughts or acts. Unfortunately, these thoughts and acts are part of the disease of depression." But the company made its first small concession, noting on the Prozac label in May, 1990, that "suicidal ideation" and "violent behavior" had been reported (as had pancreatitis) as side-effects. This reference appeared in the "Postintroduction Reports" section towards the bottom of the label. No mention of suicidal ideation was added to the "Precautions" section.

The FDA held a hearing in September 1990 at which its Psychotropic Drugs Advisory Committee (most of whose members got funding from antidepressant manufacturers) considered whether SSRIs can induce violent and suicidal thoughts. They voted 9-0 not to recommend a more prominent warning and 6-3 not to recommend a warning in small type that would have read, "In a small number of patients, depressive symptoms have worsened during therapy, including the emergence of suicidal thoughts and attempts. Surveillance throughout treatment is recommended."

Lilly and the other antidepressant manufacturers made more finite, begrudging concessions in the years ahead as evidence linking SSRIs to suicide kept mounting. A turning point came in April 2004, when the British Medical Journal reported that GlaxoSmithKline had concealed data showing that Paxil more than quadrupled suicidal ideation among teenagers. A few months later the FDA acknowledged a study showing that SSRI use induced suicidal thoughts in two out of 100 adolescents and ordered a black box warning. Prozac sales dipped as a result and Lilly et al commissioned the study that JAMA published April 18, showing that SSRI use induces suicidal ideation in only one in 100. Suicidal ideation," "Suicide gesture," "Suicide attempt," and other such terms do not accurately characterize the extremely bizarre flip-outs induced by SSRIs. Carefully planning to annihilate the student body fits the profile. Biting your mother 57 times. Driving your car around in circles until you smash into a tree... Years ago, at a meeting of the Prozac Survivors Support group, I heard Bonnie Leitsch, a flamboyant redhead from Louisville who sounded like Minnie Pearl, try to explain what Prozac did to her thinking:

"It's hard for people to understand. They say 'you must know what you're doing,' but you do not. You cannot distinguish reality. I could never tell if I was awake or asleep. That was the hardest thing for me to determine. I would lay down in bed and I would think 'Now am I dreaming this or am I awake and doing this?" My mind constantly ran, it never would stop. I could be having this conversation with you and the whole time if I was drinking coffee, I could be thinking about running it on my hand and wondering what it would feel like. Thinking irrational thoughts. And yet still able to communicate at what would appear to be a rational level. That's why I think psychiatrists and psychologists and doctors who are dealing with people on Prozac are totally oblivious to what's going on. These people are the best liars in the whole world in terms of being able to come to you and say 'I'm fine.' But the whole time they might be thinking 'I wonder what it would feel like to stick this knife in my hand?' And, 'I can take on a motorcycyle gang and kill 'em all.' Most of these people on Prozac like myself lose all natural ability to love. It becomes a spiritual dullness. You cease to know right from wrong. Because there's no wrong and you're right 100 percent and the hell with the rest of you."

The media just can't fathom Seung Hui Cho's lethal outburst, but Bonnie Leitsch -may she still be going strong- can fathom it all too well.
Fred Gardner edits O'Shaughnessy's, the Journal of Cannabis in Clinical Practice (soon to have a presence on the web). He can be reached at fred@plebesite.com

Reputation Comments on this post:

Good find

[Nagognog2]

I lived in a fascist town for many years. The police went out on hits to beat up kids, blacks, Jews...name it. So I became a "scanner-freak" - i listened in on their frequency on the radio. And many other departments as well. I learned something interesting back in 1989 - to begin with...

Police were terrified when they got a report of someone who was taking or stopped taking Prozac. They knew that people on Prozac were far more likely to go berserk and start shooting or trying to run them over or...etc. This drug scared the living shit out of them. And that was in 1989!

The dangers of these drugs have been well known for a lot longer than the multi-billion dollar consortium, protecting their profits, would want you to know.

<EDIT> Oh yeah - when they found their "I just gots us a nigger! Ha Ha!" started appearing in the local papers from the radio - they spent over $100,000 of the taxpayers money to scramble their transmissions. Said it was for National Security. They were shoved out of town shortly thereafter.

[stoneinfocus]

Funny thing also, the "professional" dontß tell the patients about consequences and sides, tehy´re giving out the pills, awaiting the next baha,mas conference on new drugs.

Like these cases about roaccutane causing suicides, when it was told to the teenies, it was their acne-pill causing it, they just didnt kill themselves anymore, because they knew the mood they´re in, is most likely caused by their pimple-treaty.

[lulz]

Something caught my eye in relation to prescription drugs, and it's been bothering me since I read it. This story was published the day after the shooting, his videos hadn't reached NBC yet so the media was still trying to figure out why Cho had gone on a rampage.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=3048108&page=2

Some news accounts have suggested that Cho had a history of antidepressant use, but senior federal officials tell ABC News that they can find no record of such medication in the government's files. This does not completely rule out prescription drug use, including samples from a physician, drugs obtained through illegal Internet sources, or a gap in the federal database, but the sources say theirs is a reasonably complete search.

Uh, what the fuck? Am I the only one who didn't know there's a "federal database" containing every single medical record in America???

[darawk]

Originally Posted by lulz

Something caught my eye in relation to prescription drugs, and it's been bothering me since I read it. This story was published the day after the shooting, his videos hadn't reached NBC yet so the media was still trying to figure out why Cho had gone on a rampage.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=3048108&page=2




Uh, what the fuck? Am I the only one who didn't know there's a "federal database" containing every single medical record in America???

There isn't. ABC is just retarded. Some states have prescription tracking laws, but afaik, they only apply to scheduled/controlled drugs. And I don't know what the specific situation is in Virginia.

[enquirewithin]

The guy should not even have been able to buy a gun either! If Prozac, or a related compound, is to blame, this will be supressed. Only dealers of illegal drugs get blamed for deaths, not Big Pharma.

It sesm as the dangers of prozac and relatives, are well documented:

Psychiatric Drugs Claim 33 more victims

• Posted by Ron Meyerson on Wednesday, April 18th at 9:46 PM
  Cho Seung-Hui May Be 9th School Shooter Under Influence of Psychiatric Drugs -- Documented to Cause Homicidal Ideation, Suicide, Psychosis, Mania and Hostility
  In the wake of yesterday's shooting rampage at Virginia Tech by gunman Cho Seung-Hui, state legislators, civic and human rights activists are asking why Congress has failed to investigate the link between psychiatric drugs and school violence, given the high rate of psychiatric drug use by the shooters. According to breaking news from investigators at Virginia Tech, Cho may have taken depression drugs—documented by the Food and Drug Administration to cause suicidal behavior, mania, psychosis, hallucinations, hostility and “homicidal ideation.” (link) If Cho Seung-Hui’s psychiatric drug use is confirmed, it would bring the total to 61 killed and 77 wounded by psychiatric drug-induced school shootings.
  
  In September 2005, following confirmation that Red Lake Indian Reservation school shooter, Jeff Weise, was under the influence of the antidepressant Prozac, the National Foundation of Women Legislators, together with American Indian tribal leaders, called for a Congressional investigation (link) into the correlation between psychiatric drug use and school massacres. To date there has been no response to this request despite documentation that at least eight recent school shooters were under the influence of psychiatric drugs at the time of the shootings.
  
  The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), a mental health watchdog that initially discovered the psychiatric drug connection in the Columbine shootings, warns that the psycho-pharmaceutical industry will once again try to obscure the violence-inducing nature of psychiatric drugs in order to protect the billions in profit from drug sales. CCHR says that Congress must demand a full investigation into the link between senseless acts of violence and psychiatric drug use in the wake of recent FDA warnings on the documented drug risks.
  
  In eight recent school shootings, psychiatric drugs were the common factor, in other instances, the shooter’s medical records were never made public and their psychiatric drug use remains in question.
  
  September 28, 2006: Bailey, Colorado: Duane Morrison, 53, entered Platte Canyon High School and shot and killed one girl, and sexually assaulted 6 others. Antidepressants were found in his vehicle.
  
  March 21, 2005: Red Lake Indian Reservation, Minnesota: 16-year-old Native American Jeff Weise was under the influence of the antidepressant Prozac when he shot and killed nine people and wounding five before committing suicide.
  
  April 10, 2001: Wahluke, Washington: 16-year-old Cory Baadsgaard took a rifle to his high school, and held 23 classmates and a teacher hostage while on a high dose of the antidepressant Effexor.
  
  March 22, 2001: El Cajon, California: 18-year-old Jason Hoffman was on two antidepressants, Effexor and Celexa, when he opened fire at his California high school wounding five.
  
  March 7, 2000: Williamsport, Pennsylvania: 14-year-old Elizabeth Bush was on the antidepressant Prozac when she blasted away at fellow students in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, wounding one.
  
  May 20, 1999: Conyers, Georgia: 15-year-old T.J. Solomon was being treated with a mix of antidepressants when he opened fire on and wounded 6 of his classmates.
  
  April 20, 1999: Columbine, Colorado: 18-year-old Eric Harris was on the antidepressant Luvox when he and his partner Dylan Klebold killed 12 classmates and a teacher and wounded 23 others before taking their own lives in the bloodiest school massacre to date. The coroner confirmed that the antidepressant was in his system through toxicology reports while Dylan Klebold’s autopsy was never made public.
  
  April 16, 1999: Notus, Idaho: 15-year-old Shawn Cooper fired two shotgun rounds in his school narrowly missing students; he was taking a mix of antidepressants.
  
  May 21, 1998: Springfield, Oregon: 15-year-old Kip Kinkel murdered his own parents and then proceeded to school where he opened fire on students in the cafeteria, killing two and wounding 22. Kinkel had been on Prozac.
  
  Read this report by CCHR to find out more about the dangerous connection between violence and psychiatric drugs.
  
  For more information, contact the Citizens Commission on Human Rights at 800-869-2247 or email humanrights@cchr.org
  
  

http://winnipeg.indymedia.org/item.php?5048S

[Nagognog2]

If George Bush got on national TV and said he was popping Prozac and intended to nuke San Francisco because God told him to wipe out the gays, Prozac would be held innocent and the gays in San Francisco would he blamed for their destruction.

[stoneinfocus]

That´s what happens if you ruin the image of well known and well working safe amphetamines and are forced to close the marketing-gap induced by throwing dexies, pervitines et al. (all analeptics, that are sdupposed to be fun, open up and helping all peolpe to some kind, are banned here, because if some are happy it´s cool, if some others trying to be it, it´s misus, it´s a great big medicla kindergarten) off the market.

Engeneering some half assing receptor-agonsits, that are supposed to do the same thing, just worse and in the "good old" bitter medicine fashioned way... no, medicine has not have to be fun and to work out as good as it can be.

Swim is sourrounded by 6-yerr old, incest-born chldren ,with academical grades, wearing doctor-kilts. ( adoc, that´s not ,even for shor,t trying out the medicine he gives out on himself, is of the worth of a used car-trader)


And to add a comment on this specific case, if this guiy had an "imaginary" girl friend this youg guy was severly disturbed and never ever should have taken any SSRI I don´t know what psychiatric docs are learning or if they know whatthey´re doing, I think they don´t, just throw em in prison and let them prescribe their medicicne to themselves only, socoety would be a much much better place for all of us, so this would have been, according to some therapetuical rules the worst madicine to give someone that hears voices, or is entertaining a relationship and this not to the best, with an imgainary girl-friend -by the way, I think he is/was gay.