Like most other Americans, I've spent the last couple of months trying to make sense of all the howling about the dire influence of violence on television, savagery in movies and mayhem in video games on our children today.
Recently, however, I've come to wonder why the same crisismongers kicking up the fuss over these topics aren't asking hard questions about the so-called mental-health medication increasingly being dispensed to our kids.T.J. Solomon, the high-school shooter in Conyers, Ga., was reportedly taking the drug Ritalin. Eric Harris, the ringleader of the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Col., had been prescribed the drug Luvox. And Kip Kinkel, the student in Springfield, Ore., who killed his parents and then went on a shooting rampage at his high school, was taking the psychiatric drugs Prozac and Ritalin.
There were many other possible factors in their cases, of course, but I couldn't help wondering if these drugs might have had some influence on their actions.
In an effort to educate myself, I invited Ann B. Tracy, author of Prozac: Panacea or Pandora? (Cassia Publications, 1999), to appear on my syndicated talk-radio show. Her book is the result of five years of research into the booming mental-health-medication industry and the pharmaceutical companies whose coffers it so plentifully fills.
My conversation with Tracy was indeed an eye opener. She directed me to a 1997 letter written to Time magazine by Candace B. Pert, a research professor at Washington's Georgetown University Medical Center.
"I am alarmed at the monster that Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Solomon Snyder and I created when we discovered the simple binding assay for drug receptors 25 years ago," Pert wrote. "Prozac and other antidepressant serotonin-receptor-active compounds may also cause cardiovascular problems in some susceptible people after long-term use, which has become common practice despite the lack of safety studies.
"The public is being misinformed about the precision of these selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors when the medical profession oversimplifies their action in the brain ..."
Intrigued, I decided to investigate further. A week later I talked with Dr. Peter R. Breggin, a psychiatrist who is the author of Talking Back to Ritalin (Common Courage Press, 1998) and the president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International. He shared his concern about the number of children on psychiatric drugs.
"Several million children are being treated with Ritalin and other stimulants on the grounds that they have attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder and suffer from inattention, hyperactivity or impulsivity," Breggin says in his book. "The stimulants include: Ritalin (methylphenidate), Dexedrine and DextroStat (dextroamphetamine or d-amphetamine), Adderall (d-amphetamine and amphetamine mixture), Desoxyn and Gradumet (methamphetamine), and Cylert (pemoline)."
"Except for Cylert," Breggin notes, "all of these drugs have nearly identical effects and side effects ... Ritalin and amphetamine frequently cause the very same problems they are supposed to treat _ inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity. A large percentage of children become robotic, lethargic, depressed or withdrawn on stimulants.
"Withdrawal from Ritalin can cause emotional suffering, including depression, exhaustion and suicide," he adds. "This can make children seem psychiatrically disturbed and lead mistakenly to increased doses of medication."
Breggin points out that today there are more than 909,000 children and adolescents between the ages of 6 and 18 receiving psychiatric antidepressant drugs in the United States alone.
As for Luvox, the antidepressant Eric Harris was taking, Breggin's report is intriguing _ and frightening.
"According to the manufacturer, Solvay, four percent of children and youth taking Luvox developed mania during short-term clinical trials," he says. "Mania is a psychosis which can produce bizarre, grandiose, highly elaborated destructive plans, including mass murder ..."
It seems hardly irrational to wonder if there was a link between these designer drugs and the violent, antisocial actions of the children taking them.
Did Luvox play a substantial role in the massacre at Columbine High School? Was Kinkel at least in part motivated to kill his parents and shoot up his school because he was on Prozac? Could his Ritalin prescription have been a significant factor in T.J. Solomon's rampage at his high school?
I'm no doctor, but these coincidences strike me as too glaring for the medical community to ignore.
It's no endorsement to say that we can understand the antisocial rationale that drives one kid in the ghetto or the barrio to murder another over turf conflicts, macho aggression or drug disputes. It's irrational, but at least it's comprehensible.
But many of us are hard-pressed to understand how violent video games, violent movies or firearms _ all of which have long been available to our children in one form or another _ can suddenly be responsible for so many white-bread suburban and country kids lashing out and massacring their parents and schoolmates.
But when a surprising number of these students turn out to have been administered psychiatric drugs with little regard for their known or unknown side effects ... well, it doesn't prove anything, but it certainly makes me want to learn more.
c.1999 Ken Hamblin
Ken Hamblin is the author of “Pick a Better Country.” He writes a column for the Denver Post and has been a radio talk-show host for 15 years. His program is syndicated by American View Inc., and currently is carried by 120 stations across the country.
It turns out that Ted Kaczynski, a k a the Unabomber, was a volunteer in mind-control experiments sponsored by the CIA at Harvard in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Michael Mello, author of the recently published "The United States of America vs. Theodore John Kaczynski," notes that at some point in his Harvard years -- 1958 to 1962 -- Kaczynski agreed to be the subject of "a psychological experiment." Mello says merely that the chief researcher for these Harvard studies had been a lieutenant colonel in World War II, working for the CIA's predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services, then later for the CIA. In fact, the man experimenting on the young Kaczynski (who was given the code name Lawful) was Dr. Henry Murray, who died in 1988 at the ripe age of 95. Born rich in a townhouse on a site now occupied by Rockefeller Center, Murray became preoccupied by psychoanalysis in the 1920s, drawn to it through a fascination with Melville's "Moby Dick," which he gave to Sigmund Freud, who duly made the excited diagnosis that the whale was a father figure. Murray was then analyzed by Carl Jung. After spending the 1930s developing personality theory, Murray was recruited to OSS at the start of the war, applying his theories to the selection of agents, also presumably to interrogation.
As chairman of the Department of Social Relations at Harvard, Murray zealously prosecuted the CIA's efforts to carry forward experiments in mind control conducted by Nazi doctors in the concentration camps. The overall program was under the management of the late Sidney Gottlieb, head of the CIA's technical services division. As Harvard students were fed doses of LSD, psilocybin and other potions, so too were prisoners and many unwitting guinea pigs. Sometimes, the results were disastrous.
A dram of LSD fed by Gottlieb himself to an unwitting U.S. Army officer, Frank Olson, plunged Olson into escalating psychotic episodes that culminated in Olson's abrupt and fatal descent from an upper window in the Statler-Hilton in New York. At the time of his death, Gottlieb was the object of a lawsuit not only by Olson's children but also by the sister of another man, Stanley Milton Glickman, whose life had disintegrated into psychosis after he had been unwittingly dosed by Gottlieb in Paris. What did Dr. Murray give Kaczynski? Did the experiment's long-term effects help tilt him into the Unabomber's homicidal rampages? The CIA's mind- experiment program of those years was vast. How many other human time bombs were thus primed by Gottlieb's doctors? How many of them have exploded? There are other psychic land mines aplenty, sown in haste, ignorance or indifference to long-term consequences.
Amid all the finger-pointing to causes prompting the recent wave of schoolyard killings, not nearly enough clamor has been raised about the fact that many of these teenagers suddenly erupting into mania were on a regimen of anti-depressants. Eric Harris, one of the two shooters at Columbine, was on Luvox. Kip Kinkel, who killed his parents and two students in Springfield, Ore., was on Prozac. There are a number of other instances.
Apropos of possible linkage, Dr. Peter Breggin, author of books on Prozac and Ritalin, has said: "I have no doubt that Prozac can contribute to violence and suicide. I've seen many cases. In the recent clinical trial, 6 percent of the children became psychotic on Prozac. And manic psychosis can lead to violence." A 15-year-old girl attending a very ritzy liberal arts school in the Northeast told me last week that 80 percent of the kids in her class were on Prozac, Ritalin or Dexedrine, either separately or in combo.
The pretext used by the school authorities is Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), with a diagnosis made on the basis of questions such as "Do you find yourself daydreaming or looking out the window during school?"
Ritalin is currently being given to about 2 million American school children. A 1986 article by Richard Scarnati in The International Journal of the Addictions lists over a hundred adverse reactions to Ritalin, including paranoid delusions, paranoid psychosis, amphetamine-like psychosis and terror.
Meanwhile uncertainty reigns on the precise nature of the complaint Ritalin is supposed to be treating. One panel reviewing the proceedings on the conference on ADHD put on last year by the National Institute of Mental Health even doubted whether ADHD is a "valid" diagnosis of a broad range of children's behavior and said there was little evidence Ritalin did any good. Two years earlier, in 1996, the Drug Enforcement Agency denounced the use of Ritalin and concluded that "the dramatic increase in the use of (Ritalin) in the 1990s should be viewed as a marker or warning to society." Indeed. Land mines now litter the terrain of our society, waiting to explode.
COPYRIGHT 1999 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Alexander Cockburn is the editor of 'Counterpunch', a well-known political newsletter.
There's been a big fuss in New York over the disclosure that patients in the state health system are being dosed with experimental drugs. The New York Post has been breaking hair-raising stories about experiments inside the state medical system that have killed at least one patient -- Joseph Santana, last Oct. 13.
A German drug company, Hoechst Marion Roussel, was paying the state of New York to experiment on people like the late Santana. He was dosed with an experimental drug, M 100907, Olanzapine and Ativan. The Post disclosed a draft report of the state department of health that said the state should be allowed to engage in "slightly risky experimentation on mentally ill adults -- even if the patients are unable to grant or deny consent." Rising in strenuous denunciation of this disgusting policy on Jan. 19, the Post marshaled Immanuel Kant: "Every man is his own sovereign and cannot be exploited for the use or benefit of another."
The problem is that we're awash with drugs, sanctioned by the Food and Drug Administration, which are ongoing "experiments" carrying great risks and costs. Take methadone, originally formulated in .. Germany and initially named "Dolophine" in honor of Adolf Hitler. Dolophine had been developed by I.G. Farben, makers of Zyklon B. Ervin Kleiderer, a research chemist from the U.S. pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly, led a research team to Hoechst am Main in 1945 to examine the I.G. Farben plant. Kleiderer brought back the mix for Dolophine, initially sold by Lilly as a cough medicine, retaining the old [German] name.
The drug was removed from the market but later made its big comeback as methadone, a viciously addictive drug that is given to heroin users and captures them even more effectively. Methadone centers in New York have come under well-merited assault from Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Shrinks and "health workers" like methadone because it reduces the addict/patient to a compliant slave, a condition the health bureaucrats esteem.
Prozac is another ongoing experiment. Tricyclic antidepressants -- not heroin or cocaine -- had been the leading cause of emergency-room overdose deaths in the mid-1980s. With the introduction of Prozac, physicians could prescribe an antidepressant without providing potentially suicidal people with a possibly fatal bottle of pills. Prozac was developed by scientists who posited that depression is the result of low levels of a chemical messenger in the brain called serotonin.
The FDA granted Lilly "investigational new drug" status for Prozac in March 1976, and over the course of the next 10 years, the company spent an estimated $80 million underwriting clinical trials, first on animals, then on people.
The clinical trials of Prozac excluded suicidal patients, children and elderly adults -- although once FDA approval is granted, a drug can be prescribed for anyone. Some 4,000 people were involved in various premarketing studies, but only 1,730 were in placebo-controlled trials. The approval of Prozac was based, ultimately, on fewer than 300 patients who met various criteria established by Lilly and the FDA.
Because only 63 patients were on fluoxetine (the psychoactive compound given the trade name Prozac) for a period of more than two years, nobody knows what the long-term effects are. Some physicians have foreseen a range of problems developing in years to come -- including dependency (as indicated by tolerance buildup and withdrawal symptoms upon cessation), damage to the liver, early onset of Alzheimer's and so on.
There isn't a day or night when corporate or government researchers aren't pressing ahead with tests and experiments risky to the health of the populace. The essential role of the FDA and kindred bodies is somehow to persuade us that everything is OK. The heyday for the experimenters came in the early Cold War years when the citizenry inhaled everything from strontium 90 to bacteria sprayed in subways and bus stations by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, trying to figure out what would happen if the Russians introduced smallpox strains at Washington National Airport and the downtown bus station.
In this particular operation, agents from the Army's chemical special operations division carried dummy suitcases into a terminal at National and into the downtown Greyhound bus terminal. The suitcases had concealed sprayers that released millions of bacillus subtilis bacteria.
In the words of a press report in 1984 relaying the Army's admission that it had conducted such experiments 20 years earlier, "An analysis of test results concluded doses of microbes inhaled by passengers were 'large and of acceptable uniformity' enough to cause infection had smallpox virus been used instead of the bacteria." It turned out that the bacteria, which were supposed to be harmless, actually caused food and blood poisoning, plus respiratory problems. In kindred experiments, the Army prompted measles epidemics in a couple of communities in Florida and Georgia.
Often enough, one runs across experiments in which many or all of the victims turn out to have been black, as they were at Tuskegee. One 1975 experiment done on 34 people, 33 of whom were black, consisted of giving alcoholics anal injections of paraldehyde. At least two died from the injections, some tried suicide, and others became violent. None was a willing participant. A doctor took temperatures of the dying. There were no autopsies.
COPYRIGHT 1999 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.