Saturday, February 16, 2008

Mass Murder By Prescription

On February 14th at Northern Illinois University, Steven Kazmierczak opened fire on a class of students in a lecture hall, killing 7 and wounding 18. This was another shocking act of senseless violence in a long line of senseless violence committed by seemingly harmless individuals.
There was the Kansas shopping mall shootings, the Virginia Tech Massacre and that is only the tip of the iceberg. The debate has centered on gun control and the ease with wich people who are bent on committing acts such as these can get guns. The gun lobbyist push the line that if all Americans were armed, then they couuld protect themselves from these "nuts". I don't even want to go there.
Instead, I'd like to put forth another rational altogether for the proliferation of seemingly irrational violent acts which have plagued America since the late 1980's.
I'm including the Columbine High School Massacre as well.
What links these violent acts? What do the perpetratators all seem to have in common?
One after another, when I read the bios of the shooters, one fact stands out.. They were all diagnosed with forms of depression and under prescription for Prozac or another related psycho active sedative.
Prozac was brought to the market as a wonder drug. The easy magic way to end depression. It became the most over prescribed drug in history. Meanwhile, in the rush to bring it to market by the E. I. Lilley Corporation, studies on the side effects were ignored and plastered over with protocols regarding the monitoring of the patients.
The links provided tell of tragic stories of suicides and violent rampages triggered by the use of Prozac.
One of the most tragic tales is the story of the 13 year old American Indian boy in Red Lake, Minnesota who massacred his classmates in a reservation school house.
He had been diagnosed as severely depressed after his parents were involved in a car crash that killed his father and left his mother in a coma. He was prescribed Prozac by a government clinic at the reservation and when the dosage didn't seem to be working it was doubled to twice the recommendation. The black box warning stated that this level of medication had to be monitored by a psychiatrist weekly. After the massacre, it was found that it had been months since he had been examined.
If this is the case, and it is proven that the over prescription and unmonitored use of Prozac is the cause of these violent incidents because E.I Lilley pushed to get this drug on the market and in general usage, putting caution behind the greed for profits, they have an awful lot of blood on their hands!

1 comment:

Village Green said...

It's a lot easier to medicate than look for possible causes for the increasing numbers of depressed people. Nobody seems to want to talk about the effects of over-population, for example.