Psychotropic drugs and shootings

March 4, 2008 (SF Chronicle)
Don Hart

The recent shooting at Northern Illinois University is the latest in

a long line of tragedies brought about by the failure of legally

prescribed psychotropic drugs. Virtually every one of these public

massacres was done by people taking these drugs, mostly “selective

serotonin re-uptake inhibitors,” like Prozac, Zoloft and Wellbutrin.

The fact that the shooter at Northern Illinois University was “off

his meds” is of no consequence.

For the most part, these people want to get off their meds because it

makes them feel like zombies. No one wants to feel like that. So, unless

all these patients are put in lockdown wards (I am definitely not

advocating this), they will tend to go “off their meds.” Of course, the

two Columbine shooters were fully on their meds.

It is one thing for a particular drug or other medical procedure to

be ineffective, or even dangerous, to individual patients. But it’s

something else altogether when a whole class of drugs has the potential

to put a mentally unstable person on a path toward a killing spree.

These drugs, the huge pharmaceutical corporations that manufacture

and promote them, the doctors who prescribe them, and the government

agencies that support the questionable research and are supposed to

provide a “watchdog” function for the public, are all guilty of creating

a public health menace.

Look up any of these drugs in reference books, and you will find

under “adverse effects” and, sometimes under “warnings: “anxiety,

agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility,

aggressiveness, impulsivity… hypomania, and mania, have been reported

in adult and pediatric patients being treated with antidepressants.”

Recently, “Black Box Warnings,” the most serious sort of warning

short of pulling a drug, have been added to many of these drugs, citing

suicide risk to juveniles and young adults.

Is anyone cured of depression from these “anti-depressants?” No. The

administration of all modern psychotropic drugs is based upon the big

pharma-sponsored myth of “biochemical imbalance.” If this is correct,

then why isn’t the “biochemistry” of psychiatric patients checked before

prescribing, and during treatment?

There are discovered, to date, more than 80 neurotransmitters, all

interdependent. Most of these drugs alter the effect or the available

supply of one, sometimes two, occasionally three neurotransmitters. What

the cascade effect upon all the other neurotransmitters is, no one

knows.

So, what else can we do?

A hundred years ago, D. D. D. Palmer, the discoverer of chiropractic,

wrote: “Chiropractors correct abnormalities of the intellect, as well as

the body.” From the early to the mid-20th century, there were

chiropractic sanitoriums. One of these, in Davenport, Iowa, was the

Forest Park Sanitorium. North Dakota judge A. W. Ponath (in a time when

judges regularly committed, and un-committed, mental patients) noted

that at the North Dakota state mental hospital, the “cure and discharge

rate” ranged from 18 percent to 27 percent, compared with 65 percent at

Forest Park.

During 26 years of practice, I have seen dozens of people on various

psychotropic medications. While chiropractic adjustments took pressure

off their nervous systems (of which, obviously, the brain is a part),

and their bodies got well, so did their minds. And … no one got shot.

Dr. Don Harte is a wellness chiropractor in Marin County, in practice

for 26 years, and an activist within the profession. His e-mail is

harteofchiropractic@gmail.com.

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