What's triggering these triggermen?

[Guest guest]

" WC Douglass " <realhealth

 

Daily Dose - What's triggering these triggermen?

Mon, 14 Mar 2005 09:18:52 -0500

Daily Dose

 

 

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March 14, 2005

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A boy convicted, a dangerous drug exonerated

 

A few months ago (Daily Dose, 11/2/04), in the wake of a year's worth

of stories about a link between antidepressants and suicide, I wrote

to you about the case of 13-year-old Christopher Pittman, a South

Carolina youth who - mere weeks after starting on the popular

antidepressant drug Zoloft - shot-gunned his grandparents to death,

then set their house on fire and fled with the family dog.

 

The boy's defense maintained that the drug made him do it - or at

least made him emotionally unstable enough that his Grandfather's

routine disciplining of him for starting a fight on the school bus

sent him into a murderous rage which ended with two dead bodies, and

the boy himself a virtual orphan...

 

At that time, the case was before a Palmetto State court, and the

questions I asked were:

 

1) Is it really so unreasonable to wonder whether this kid - who

before the Zoloft had shown no history of violence - would have pulled

the trigger on his Grandparents if he HADN'T been under the influence

of psychotropic drugs?

 

2) How much study are drug makers (or other entities - like, say, the

FDA) directing at whether antidepressants cause kids to become violent

- especially now that they've been shown to be linked to teenage suicide?

 

Apparently, these concerns weren't enough to stop a judge from

sentencing Pittman on February 15th to 30 years in prison for the

murders, the state's minimum sentence for the crimes. As I said back

in November, I have mixed feelings about this trial, now this

conviction. The jury did not, however, as they found sufficient

evidence to establish Pittman guilty of first degree murder - despite

the testimony of a doctor that the drugs could have caused the

killings. According to CNN.com, a psychiatrist testified in Pittman's

trial that the defense's assertion that Zoloft caused the boy to have

hallucinations that led to violence isn't out of the ballpark,

clinically speaking. Further, the M.D. stated under cross examination

that the boy did not have the mental capacity to tell right from wrong

at the time of the killings.

 

What didn't become a central issue to the trial is this: The

antidepressant drug Zoloft is NOT approved for the treatment of

depression in children. Many doctors prescribe it, however, including

Pittman's - apparently without penalty, even now that people have

died. I think such doctors should be punished - especially since

Pittman's isn't the only case in which this kind of violence has been

connected to antidepressants. Read on...

 

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By now, in the wake of the Vioxx scandal and the years-long

antidepressant/suicide story, cloak-and-dagger tales about drug

company cover-ups shouldn't surprise you. But the latest allegations

along these lines might have been relevant to young Christopher

Pittman's case.

 

According to a January issue of the British Medical Journal, an

anonymous source sent to that publication documents indicting that Eli

Lilly & Company, the makers of the Prozac antidepressant drug, knew

about the medication's association with some disturbing side effects -

including violence and suicidal tendencies - since the late 1980s.

Apparently, the documents were once part of a lawsuit filed against

Eli Lilly on behalf of...

Victims of a MULTIPLE SHOOTING, not unlike in Pittman's case.

 

As reported in a recent AP online article, the documents -

inexplicably missing for over a decade - were originally part of a

1994 civil suit filed by the victims (mostly next of kin, I assume) of

gunman Joseph Wesbecker's armed 1989 rampage through his Louisville,

Kentucky workplace that left 9 dead, himself included.

 

Just one month earlier, Wesbecker had starting taking Prozac.

 

The documents, according to the BMJ, point to 1988 clinical trial

results which showed that Prozac caused " behavioral disturbances " in

test subjects. The report has attracted the attention of at least one

U.S. Congressman, and the Food and Drug Administration, who is

reviewing the document at this time.

 

Despite the outward appearance of a cover-up, Lilly maintains that

Prozac is one of the most studied drugs in the world, and that it has

been safely prescribed to 50 million people worldwide. They claim not

to know anything about the missing documents...

 

Stay tuned - more on this as it develops.

 

Playing judge and jury to the executioners,

 

William Campbell Douglass II, MD

 

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