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Mixing Drugs, Guns, Crushing Poverty, Generational  Racism, and Predatory Capitalism Doesn’t Work

March 21, 2005 - Red Lake, Minnesota – Under the crazy-making and neurotoxic influence of 60 mg of Prozac,  and using his grandfather’s shotgun and Glock pistol, Jeff Weise, age 16, shot and killed his grandfather and his grandfather’s girl friend at their home. He then went to his Red Lake High School and shot and killed a security guard, a teacher, 5 students, and finally himself, leaving a total of 10 dead and 7 wounded. Weise had previously spent about a year and a half in a residential juvenile treatment program, presumably under the care of a prescribing psychiatrist and other mental health personnel. Weise had reportedly had had his dose of Prozac increased to 60 mg per day. (Note: only one American SSRI “antidepressant” [all of which have  identical mechanisms of action and cause adverse effects] is FDA-approved for adolescents, and in some European nations it is against the law for doctors to prescribe SSRIs for children because of the  lack of long-term safety studies and the known increased incidence of violence and suicide. The usual starting dose of Prozac for adults is 10 - 20 mg/day and 8% of the population lacks the liver enzymes to metabolize and de-toxify SSRI drugs, thus becoming instantly toxic from the drugs.)

“Most drugs that can cause suicide, including the antidepressants, mood-stabilizers, antipsychotics, smoking cessation drugs and others, can also cause violence. The akathisia, psychotic decompensation, or emotional disinhibition these drugs trigger that lead some to suicide, lead others to violence. There is some awareness …but considerable resistance to the idea… Treatment induced violence lies in a medical blind spot - no doctor wants to contemplate the possibility that she may have had a role in the deaths of innocent third parties.” -  Dr David Healy, from his 2008 article, entitled “The Hidden Gorilla” (at: http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/08/the-hidden-gorilla/)

“Nobody in the media has, to my knowledge, has had the courage to report what the drugs that all these school shooters were taking or withdrawing from at the time of the shootings, nor have they interviewed the prescribing physicians, hospitals or  clinics to find out the rationale for prescribing drugs that have known suicide- and violence-inducing effects (with black box warnings in the prescribing information).Therefore nothing has been learned from these important and endlessly repeated and potentially teachable moments, probably because revealing these inconvenient facts would be economically and medico-legally risky for the sacred cows of Big Pharma, Big Insurance and Big Medicine.” – Gary G. Kohls, MD – (From: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Are-Soldiers-Suicides-Caus-by-Martha-Rosenberg-101015-973.html)

Joining most national Republican leaders, “Democratic senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are top recipients of donations from the pharmaceutical industry (in 2008).” -- The Center for Responsive Politics

On March 21, 2015 the Duluth News-Tribune published a front page article (written by a Minnesota Public Radio journalist) about the infamous school shooting in Red Lake, MN that occurred 10 years earlier. The article was a fine example of human interest story-telling about that painful, tragic event: that still stands as the worst mass shooting in Minnesota for the past 150 years. (The Red Lake shooting was only exceeded by 1) the mass shootings – by the US Army - of Jeff Weise’s Native American ancestors during the Sioux Uprising of 1862 when the US Government reneged on another treaty and 2) the extra-judicial mass hangings of 38 Dakota Sioux “suspects” on the first day of Christmas, 1862 at Mankato, MN.)
But, just like virtually every major media journalist - or politician or clinic or psychiatrist or drug company or any other entity that has a vested interest in obfuscating unwelcome facts about America’s prescription drug and vaccine industries - the writer fell short.
When America was a true democracy and there was true freedom of the press, journalists used to dig up unwelcome truths about the “legalized” criminal activities of the rich, famous and predatory corporations and thus helped democracy survive in its struggle to remain independent of the corrupting influence of the captains of industry who cheated, bribed, lied, stole, and even killed in order to establish a monopoly for their products and a place of honor among the ruling class. Some of the independent newspapers allowed - and even encouraged – their journalists to do the necessary muck-raking in order to expose the white-collar criminal elements that continuously try to dominate.
In the past, there have been legendary journalists who tried to help readers fully understand what was really going on behind the scenes. These courageous journalists assisted independent and honest politicians, who we voters could trust as not having hidden conflicts of interest. By understanding what was really going on, our elected officials could help us figure out strategies to prevent future unethical actions, like the “confusing” epidemic of mass school shootings by which America has been uniquely cursed.
Readers should be demanding that publishers and editors of every media outlet allow their journalists to fully investigate suspicious events that are at risk of getting hopelessly subjected to propaganda techniques such as never giving equal media time to all parties involved in any “Big Story”, or by the endlessly repeating of the “Big Lie” that has already been pre-established by the powers-that-be that determine what is allowed to dominate the airwaves.
Whether out of ignorance or preference, what happened at Red Lake 10 years ago has never been what the media, corporate culture and officialdom has made it out to be, and those three entities are continuing to reinforce the disinformation campaign.
Jeff Weise was a victim of America’s white, Eurocentric predator nation that murderously stole his people’s land from them over 500 years ago, starting with Columbus, who started the genocide, which resulted in the killing of 90% of his ancestors and the stealing of most of their land in the process. Jeff and his “First Nations” culture have been suffering from institutional racism, endemic oppression, enforced poverty and cultural posttraumatic stress disorder that gets exacerbated very time it looks like they are going to get a break.  
Jeff Weise and his impoverished ancestors were gradually killed off by US Army-inflicted smallpox germ warfare, mass killings of the buffalo herd lifeblood, predation by alcohol, starvation and limited opportunities for the future. Over the past 500 years, his people had been forced over and over again – usually at bayonet point -  on to the least productive land (that is until gold, oil or other valuable resources like walleyes were discovered on their reservation).
Eventually his people were forced to take government handouts in order to barely survive. Government commodities of toxic white flour, toxic white sugar, toxic trans-fat oils and other processed American food products that would predictably lead to a high incidence of disabling obesity, diabetes, chronic illnesses and cancer. And the hopelessness of the imposed apartheid system invited the most recent scourge of psycho-pharmaceutical drugs and neurotoxic over-vaccination schedules that overruled the use of natural, non-toxic methods from the traditional healers.
And so the Big Pharma predators, always on the lookout for ways to expand market share, saw another profitable business opportunity emerge in the generational despair; so they invaded the reservations’ medical “systems” and, with the help of their ever-present advertising campaigns and the indoctrination of the prescriber classes, began heavily promoting the frequently addictive, brain-altering, disease-producing synthetic chemicals in convenient pill form that the industry cunningly labeled “antidepressant”, “minor and major tranquilizer”, “sedative”, “mood altering agent”, and psycho-stimulating “ADHD” drugs (actually amphetamines). Of course, the toxic food-induced, highly preventable epidemics of diabetes, obesity and hypertension – conditions that had never been a problem before corporate America started doing its dirty work among the down-trodden – added any number of synthetic chemical drugs fully capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier and causing adverse drug impacts including mental ill health.
And so it went, and the long convoluted process, traceable to the 16th century’s Spanish Conquistadors and their slavery-compatible Christian missionaries, ended at Red Lake High School on March 21, 2005. The powerful entities that are profiting from the oppression assisted by those of us who are historically-illiterate, readily place the blame for the last outrage on a convenient scapegoat like the Prozac-saturated Jeff Weise, who could stand the humiliation no longer and in an irrational, drug-intoxicated state, finally pulled the trigger on other victims other than the actual, more inaccessible culprits.

Mass Shootings are NOT Just “Senseless Acts of Violence That we Will Never be Able to Comprehend

So my point is that, in the process of journalistically ignoring the realities of the drugs and other aspects of our toxic American culture (that has been too much for many adolescent, suicidal and homicidal school shooters to bear), we the people remain befuddled by the inadequate or distorted corporate  media coverage, thus winding up believing what the powers-that-be at Big Pharma want us to believe: that “the Red Lake school shootings (and the scores of other uniquely American school shooting incidents) were just ‘senseless acts of violence that we will never be able to comprehend’ and that the >90%  correlation between the adolescent shooters and the neurotoxic brain-altering prescription drugs they were taking has nothing to do with the FDA, Big Pharma or Big Psychiatry’s drugging of America  nor should be question the influence of the National Rifle Association or any other aspect of America’s junk culture.
Of course many Duluth News-Tribune readers have already figured out the truth of the matter (that is, if they have ever heard the real details from alternative news sources like the Duluth Reader), and that is that almost all of the American school shooters that we know about were either taking or withdrawing from psych drugs at the time of the shootings. Why isn’t anybody trying to help our understanding by writing about that proven reality?
Could it be that most of the mainstream media - print, television and radio – have been self-silenced by the large amounts of advertising money from guilty drug companies? Could it be that doctors and clinics are in bed with the drug and vaccine industries and are also afraid of being accused of being accomplices to the psych drug-induced dementia, violence and suicidality epidemics? Could it be that politicians from both political parties have taken campaign bribes from the hugely profitable drug and vaccine makers in Big Pharma? Could it be that all of the above investor-class types have Big Pharma stocks in their investment portfolios? The answers are probably yes, yes, yes and yes.
There are, of course, plenty of other violence-promoting American industries that should be taking their share of the blame as one of the multiple factors that create the “perfect storms” that logically result in the “senseless” violence of mass shooters. But the only industry that has a correlation higher than drugs is the weapons industry (90% vs.100%). And each of those industries and their multibillionaire CEOs are hunkering down, avoiding comment or else sending their well-paid lobbyists and their corporate lawyers to the bully pulpit with carefully-thought-out disinformation campaigns designed to hide their culpability, all the while pointing their accusing fingers everywhere else, especially at the drug-intoxicated shooters.

Whoever Pays the Piper, Calls the Tune

So every time there is another mass shooting, Big Psychiatry has any number of conflicted psychiatrists on the talk show circuit, pretending that they are unbiased and authoritative, very ably deflecting any and all comments about the high likelihood that their cavalierly-prescribed violence/suicide/homicide/dementia-inducing drugs could be contributing factors. Just on example was Dr Jeffrey Lieberman, Chief of Psychiatry at Colombia University’s School of Medicine, who, during the last decade, was found guilty of having received -  and then not reported -  millions of dollars that he received from a variety of drug- and vaccine-producing companies. His latest bio states that he received research grants or was on the advisory boards of many psychopharmaceutical drug manufacturers and marketers including this shortened list: GlaxoSmithKline; Janssen Pharmaceuticals; Merck; Novartis Pharmaceuticals; Pfizer; and Eli Lilly. Whoever pays the piper, calls the tune.
These multibillion dollar, multinational pharmaceutical corporations, who have more highly-paid lobbyists in DC than even the NRA, Big Oil, Big Agribusiness, Big Food, the Pentagon or the multitude of companies producing addictive, homicidal, first person shooter video-games, have aggressively marketed, without long-term pre-marketing studies showing safety, the very psychotropic drugs that the school shooters short-listed farther below were either taking or withdrawing from at the time of the “senseless”  shootings.

What Psych Drugs Were The School Shooters Taking?

But, shamefully, nobody in the mainstream media ever asks this critical question: “What, if any, were the intoxicating, suicide- and violence-inducing drugs that mass shooters like Jeff Weise were taking or withdrawing from during their brief and tormented lives?”
As part of my frustration at the obvious ignorance about or rank suppression of the powerful evidence that the drugs are a major root cause of violence, I include at the end of this column (in the unabridged version of this article) some of the information that anybody interested in getting answers needs to know about and ponder.
In our society, there are many young, male, angry, confused, friendless, isolated, teased, bullied, humiliated, shamed, adrift, malnourished, sleep-deprived, obsessed video-gamers who “don’t give a damn” and might be thinking of unfocused retaliation against an unfair, cruel, neglectful, dysfunctional, abusive society. These often suicidal boys do indeed need help.
But what needs to be acknowledged is that “help” in the media and in mental health system is often a code word for prescription psych drugs (many of which – as mentioned above - must be prescribed “off label” because they have not been approved for use by the FDA for children). So the easy route to “treatment” is a quick – albeit medico-legally risky – cocktail of prescription drugs rather than thorough, compassionate, caring counseling and good brain nutrition. In our society, it is virtually reflexive for such needy patients to receive relatively untested (for either short- or long-term efficacy OR safety) and potentially lethal drugs which can become the tipping-point to ”irrational” and out-of-character behaviors such as drug-induced homicide, suicide, criminality and mental aberrations.

Guns and Drugs Don’t Mix

Every thinking person intuitively knows that guns and brain-altering drugs don’t mix, especially in the under-developed brains of children and adolescents. We get to find out what frowned-upon, illicit, brain-altering substances violent boys might be taking when they go “berserk”, such as alcohol, speed, pot, cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, heroin and “synthetic marijuana”, but asking about brain-altering psych drugs is a taboo subject.
So all of us - especially those whose jobs it is to seek out and then report the truth, such as investigative journalists, editors, criminal investigators, politicians, mental health caregivers and parents of vulnerable children - should be demanding answers to the questions discussed above: “What brain-altering psych drugs – both legal and illegal - were these school shooters taking or withdrawing from?”
 
Appendix A: A Partial List of School Shooters and their Psych Drugs From Red Lake to Sandy Hook (2015 to 2012)

 Most of the information below was obtained from http://ssristories.net/archive/indexb6a1.html?sort=date&p= and only represents 28 of the school shootings during the eight-year period from March 21, 2005 up to December 14. 2012. (Incidentally, I strongly suggest that inquiring folks study the comprehensive, well-researched YouTube video about the anomalies of the Sandy Hook episode, viewable at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzrdmZnWhPA.)

March 21, 2005 - Red Lake,
Minnesota
Jeff Weise, age 16, killed his grandfather and his grandfather’s girl friend at their home, then killed a security guard, a teacher, 5 students, and finally himself at Red Lake High School, leaving a total of 10 dead and 7 wounded. He had previously spent about a year and a half in a residential juvenile treatment program and was on 60 mg of Prozac. (The usual starting dose of Prozac for adults is 10 - 20 mg.)

January 24, 2006 - Cave City,
Arkansas
A 15-year-old student at Cave City School attempted to commit suicide at school by slitting his wristsl. He had taken 4 different antidepressants.

February, 2006 - Memphis,
Tennessee
Ladarious Guy, age 15, punched a teacher in the mouth at Memphis City High School. He had just recently started taking Zoloft.

April 24, 2006 - Hillsborough, NC
A student at East Chapel High School with a shotgun took a teacher and a fellow student hostage. He had just stopped taking antidepressants and antipsychotic medication.

August 30, 2006 - Hillsborough,
North Carolina
Alvaro Castillo, age 19, shot and killed his father, then wounded two students at Orange High School before surrendering to police. Celexa and other medications were found in his personal effects.

September 13, 2006 - Montreal,
Canada
Kimveer Gill, age 25, opened fire with a semiautomatic weapon at Dawson College. He killed 1 and injured 19 before killing himself. He had been depressed and was being treated at a local health clinic where he likely received antidepressants.

September 27, 2006 - Bailey,
Colorado
Duane Morrison, Platte Canyon High School student, took 6 female students hostage, sexually assaulted them, then shot one of them in the back of the head before shooting himself. He was on an antidepressant medication.

September 29, 2006 - Cazenovia,
Wisconsin
Eric Hainstock, a student at Weston High School, killed 1 person. He had been labeled with an ADHD diagnosis and was likely on Ritalin.

October 10, 2006 - Charleston,
South Carolina
Tyrell Glover, age 19, took an air rifle to Burke High School where he planned to hold students hostage. He was gunned down by police. He had been on an antidepressant for several years and had switched to Prozac for the previous 6 months.

December 4, 2006 - Indiana
Travis Roberson, age 16, slit a classmate’s throat at Jennings County High School. He had recently missed an unknown number of doses of his antidepressant.

January 3, 2007 - Tacoma,
Washington
Douglas Chanthabouly, age 18, shot a fellow student at Henry Foss High School. He had been in a psychiatric hospital because of a suicide attempt and was on an anti-psychotic.

April 16, 2007 - Blacksburg,
Virginia
Cho Seung-Hui, age 23, killed 32 fellow students and wounded 15 at Virginia Tech. He then killed himself. He was on prescription medications.

October 10, 2007 - Cleveland,
Ohio
Asa H. Coon, age 14, wounded 2 students and 2 teachers and then killed himself. He had been taking the antidepressant Trazodone.

November 7, 2007 - Tyler, Texas
Felicia McMillan, age 17, stabbed a male student and the principal at Robert E. Lee High School. She was taking a medication for depression.

November 7, 2007 - Tuusula,
Finland
Pekka-Eric Auvinen,age 18, shot and killed 7 students and the principal at Jokela High School. At least 10 others were injured. He then shot and kitted himself. He had Zoloft, Luvox and Prozac in his possession.

January 8, 2008 - Columbia,
Tennessee
A 15 year-old student at Spring Hill High School brought a semi-automatic gun. He also had in his possession the. antidepressant Zoloft.

January 23, 2008 - Coeur d’Alene,
Idaho
Brian Gilmore was arrested in the high school parking lot of Lake City High School with 3 stolen high powered rifles and ammunition. His mother stated that his psychiatric meds had “drastically” changed the teenager’s behavior, and his doctor had recently switched him to Prozac.

February 14, 2008 - DeKalb,
Illinois
Stephen P. Kazmierczak a former graduate student at Northern Illinois University, killed 5 students and wounded 17 more in a NIU classroom. He then killed himself. He had been seeing a psychiatrist who had prescribed for him Prozac, Xanax and Ambien.

February 15, 2008 - Blackfoot,
Idaho
Curtis Kofoed, age 16, took a handgun to Snake River High School, but did not shoot anybody. 8 hours later, he killed himself. He had depression problems in the past and was taking an antidepressant medication.

March 13, 2009 - Winnenden,
Germany
Tim Kretschmer, age 17, shot and killed 15 people at Albertville Technical High School. He had been suffering from depression, and was on antidepressants.

August 28, 2008 - Boerne, Texas
Allen Doelitsch, age 18, was jailed for asking a 14-year-old friend to join him in a “Columbine-style” attack. He had been depressed and had recently stopped his bipolar medication because of the side effects.

September 23, 2008 - Western
Finland
Matti Saari, age 22, shot and killed 10 students at the Kauhajoki School of Hospitality before killing himself. Matti Saari was taking an SSRI and a benzodiazepine.

November 10, 2009 - Pine Plains,
New York
Christopher Craft Sr., age 43, a graduate of Stissing High School, took Middle School Principal Robert Hess hostage with a shotgun. He been on Cymbalta.

December 15, 2010 - Planoise,
France
A 17 year-old with 2 swords held 20 pre-school children and their teacher hostage for 4 1/2 hours at Charles Fourier Preschool in Planoise, France. The teen was on medication for depression.

October 25, 2011 - Snohomish,
Washington
A 15 year-old student at Snohomish High School stabbed two schoolmates with kitchen knives. She had been taking medication for depression.

February 5, 2012 - Huntsville,
Alabama
Hammad Memon, age 15, shot and killed a Discover Middle School student. He had a history for being treated for ADHD and depression. He had been seeing a psychiatrist and a psychologist for ADHD and depression and was taking the antidepressant Zoloft and the addictive psychostimulant drug Ritalin.

July 20, 2012 – Aurora, Colorado
James Holmes, age 23,  an ex-medical student who was under the care of a University of Colorado psychiatrist, shot and killed 12 and wounded 58 people in an Aurora movie theater at the start of the premier showing of the newest Batman movie, “The Dark Knight”. After many months of secrecy about what psych drugs he had been on, it was finally revealed in internal police documents that Holmes had been taking Zoloft, Klonopin, Hydrocodone and Claritin.
 
December 14, 2012 - Newtown,
Connecticut
Adam Lanza, age 24, allegedly killed his mother at her home and then allegedly killed 20 children and 6 staff members at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. He apparently committed suicide at the scene. Lanza had been under the care of psychiatrists for years and, according to the Washington Post, Lanza was on undisclosed psychiatric medications.


Dr. Kohls warns against the abrupt discontinuation of any psychiatric drug because of the common, often serious withdrawal symptoms that can occur with the chronic use of any dependency-inducing psychoactive drug, whether illicit or legal.  Close consultation with an aware, informed physician who is hopefully familiar with dealing with drug withdrawal syndromes and the nutritional needs of the drug-toxified, drug-dependent and nutritionally-depleted brain.