Opus 2018-043: Drugs and Guns Don’t Mix

Recently I was stuck in a waiting room without a book.  It is a situation I try to avoid but it happens.  In desperation I picked up a magazine I would never buy, read or normally even see.  I think it was the one that Oprah puts outs.  It was an interesting look into the world of the masses.  It was like being at a snowflake convention.  It was an out of body experience.

In light of the recent school shooting and the press coverage, or lack of coverage, I remember some of the advertisements I looked at.  What sparked this was an article in WND about the elephant in the room:  Mind altering prescription drugs. 

When I came to the quotes off the label of one of the drugs, which read like this (toward the end of the article),

“...known “adverse drug reactions” – according to the drug’s FDA-approved label – include “mania,” “insomnia,” “anxiety,” “agitation,” “confusion,” “amnesia,” “depression,” “paranoid reaction,” “psychosis,” “hostility,” “delirium,” “hallucinations,” “abnormal thinking,” “depersonalization” and “lack of emotion,” among others.”

my mind went back to the ads in the magazine.  I don’t remember what the drug was but in the list of side effects I saw a lot of things like that.  I remember joking with my wife about why anyone would take something like that.

Evidently many people do. 

What might be useful to look at is the long list of shootings in which the killers were on some sort of heavy psychiatric drugs.  The list starts with the Columbine killings and reaching up to the one this week.  The point of the article is that the connection is being ignored. 

The drug used by the Columbine killers was a real read flag.

“Luvox manufacturer Solvay Pharmaceuticals concedes that during short-term controlled clinical trials, 4 percent of children and youth taking Luvox – that’s one in 25 – developed mania, a dangerous and violence-prone mental derangement characterized by extreme excitement and delusion.”

How does this kind of stuff get approved by the FDA?

When I was teaching I rarely had a class smaller than 25.  What that means is that I had a good chance of facing someone who was literally drugged out of their mind in every class.  I don’t find that scary but it does give you a perspective of the numbers we are talking about.

We need to look at a lot of government agencies.  We should not stop at the FBI and CIA.  We need to also look at the FDA.

homo unius libri