By FRED GARDNER
...A lonely, picked-on boy was given Prozac (or one of its chemical analogs) like Kip Kinkel in Oregon, like Eric Harris in Colorado This is not a scoop, America: Prozac causes horrible, bizarre flip-outs. It is a fact that has been known for 20 years and that Eli Lilly and the other manufacturers of "selective" serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) have relentlessly denied and are still trying to suppress.On the very day after the shootings at Virginia Tech, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study challenging the "black box" warning that the Food and Drug Administration had finally attached to Prozac in October, 2004. "Antidepressants Get a Boost For Use in Teens" read the Wall St. Journal headline. "Despite Warnings on Labels, Study says Benefits Outweigh Risk of Suicidal Tendencies."
The New York Times ran its account of the new pro-Prozac study on the page facing the obituaries of students and faculty members killed at Virginia Tech! "Scales Said to Tip in Favor of Antidepressant Use in Children -A risk of suicidal thoughts is found to be more than offset." You'd think that 33 deaths would more than offset it back.
Evidence that Prozac induces suicidal ideation and actions emerged when the drug was in clinical trials in Germany in the mid-1980s. The German findings were misrepresented to the FDA by a Lilly employee named Joachim Wernicke. U.S. marketing approval was granted in December, 1988, with no warning required. After a drug is marketed here in Guinea Pig Nation, only a very small fraction of the adverse events brought on by the drug get reported. Patients have to tell their doctors who then have to file paperwork with the manufacturers who then have to voluntarily tell the FDA that their products are dangerous.
Among the adverse events brought on by Prozac soon after it hit the market were numerous suicides and homicides, some of which resulted in legal action by the victims or survivors. Lilly's strategy was to conceal the trend by settling every case out of court. One of the first to capture national attention involved Joseph Wesbecker, a Louisville, Kentucky printing press operator who, on Sept. 14, 1989, killed eight co-workers with an AK-47 and injured a dozen others before committing suicide. Wesbecker had been prescribed Prozac five weeks before and his psychiatrist, noting that Wesbecker had become "very, very agitated," told him to stop taking it on Sept. 11. Victims who survived the shooting, relatives of those who died, and members of Wesbecker's family subsequently sued Eli Lilly, charging that the company "knew or should have known that users of Prozac can experience intense agitation and preoccupation with suicide, and can harm themselves or others."
...Most of these people on Prozac like myself lose all natural ability to love. It becomes a spiritual dullness. You cease to know right from wrong. Because there's no wrong and you're right 100 percent and the hell with the rest of you."
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