Friday, January 27, 2006

The attack on Big Tobacco was kid stuff

The attack on Big Tobacco was kid stuff. Whether you're for or against smoking and tobacco, you can't ignore the fact that the cigarette industry was gutted by the lawsuits over the last decades that portrayed the tobacco industry as willing to lie cheat and bring enormous economic and political pressure to push their products over the dead and dying bodies of their customers. Whether the outcome is just or not (maybe it was just but overdone -- I don't know) it worked. Smoking is no longer done in polite society. I remember a time when you could smoke anywhere. Elevators were a no-no because of some kind of "safety" excuse, but people carried lit cigarettes on elevators too. Conference rooms, restaurants, movie theatres, business offices, airplanes, were all candidates for a place to light up. There was no slightest thought, in most cases, whether you had to ask. If you were polite, you would try your best to make sure the other guy didn't sit in your smoke. Somehow, into that culture, enough of a shock was injected to change the culture. Now smokers quietly skulk off to the outdoors or their own homes and cars to light up. Lighting up a cigarette on an airplane (most of which are still outfitted with ashtrays at every seat) will get you an emergency landing and an unpleasant interview with the Homeland Security people at the very least, and probably a lot more trouble than that.

Now along comes the real villain. The cigarette companies are pikers. This is the 500-lb. gorilla of evil corporate cultures -- Big Pharma.

This writer is not anti-corporation or anti-corporate America. But there is such a thing as a bad guy. And in the corporate world, Big Pharma is a bad guy. It's like an intractable trouble-maker in the world of basketball, or a priest who likes little boys. It doesn't reflect on all basketball players or all priests, but this particular one is bad to the bone. And people are starting to figure it out. Especially those that work in the legal machine that brought down Big Tobacco. As seemingly normal people suddenly run out and shoot their friends or hang themselves in the garage after taking drugs that are supposedly designed to help with sanity, the bereft survivors and the lawyers who know how to put together class action lawsuits are teaming up for a wave of lawsuits that could be more like a tsunami.

And whether or not you liked what they did to Big Tobacco, you gotta admit this one is justice. How long ago did America turn its sober face on the story of the Columbine School massacre in Colorado, by two boys who were on psychiatric drugs, or the Prozac mother who drowned her own children, or the 12-year-old who shot his grandparents then burned the house down, or the Zoloft-laced wife of comedian Phil Hartman who inexplicably shot him, then herself. The list is very long, and growing daily. Big Tobacco might give you lung cancer eventually, but it was nothing like this.

But Big Pharma isn't going down without a fight. And the latest punch is a drug-industry sponsored law that is wending its way through congress shielding Big Pharma from state-level lawsuits. The specious argument is that because Big Pharma meets the requirements of a federal agency (the FDA) in producing their drugs, they can only be sued in a federal court. Read about it in this article by Stephen Pizzo.

Clever they are. Safe they seem. But Yoda say they will not be able to put it off forever. The actual crime here is enormous. There are individuals who have covered up the ill effects of these drugs very energetically and systematically for years and years while people died. It amounts to multiple counts of manslaughter, potentially. It's the simple truth. Sooner or later the house of cards is going to collapse.

Thursday, January 26, 2006

Mothers Who Kill

The following statement was issued by the Citizen's Commission on Human Rights:

MOTHERS WHO KILL

Dear Friends,

As civilized people we have fundamental agreements that define the type of world in which we live and the type of people who we are. One of the, if not the most, fundamental agreements has to do with the state of Motherhood. Motherhood is an institution sacred to those of all faiths, or no faith. Mothers would rather face harm themselves than let anything happen to their child. So, anything that would contribute to a mother harming their own child must indeed be evil - the stuff of nightmares, found in science fiction and horror movies.

Well, such a thing does exist - and not just in fiction. It has infiltrated real life and the lives of many people around us. It is the most horrible thing that we could confront, and confront it we must. To avert future tragedies, we must know: what could turn a loving mother into a murderer? What could possibly induce a mother to kill her own child?

Statistical analyses, medical studies and studies of individual cases have shown that psychiatric drugs and other psychiatric practices create insanity and cause violence. People who have become violent, usually for the first time, after psychiatric treatment are reported in the newspapers with alarming frequency. Each of those cases was in psychiatric hands before committing his or her crime of violence. Each was a psychiatric failure. And each was victimized by destructive psychiatric practices capable of pushing persons toward violence.

A 1988 study documented the tendency of a major tranquilizer to increase hostile and violent behavior. According to the study, many persons who had no prior history of violence, “were significantly more violent while on [this drug.]” And a March 2004 FDA Public Health Advisory warned, “Anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility, impulsivity, akathisia [severe restlessness], hypomania [abnormal excitement, mild mania] and mania [psychosis characterized by exalted feelings, delusions of grandeur and overproduction of ideas], have been reported in adult and pediatric patients being treated with antidepressants…both psychiatric and non-psychiatric.”

These are only two studies of many linking psychiatric drugs to new aggressive behaviors in those taking them.

A New Zealand report stated that withdrawal from psychoactive drugs can cause new physical symptoms. Antidepressants, according to the report, can create “agitation, severe depression, hallucinations, aggressiveness, hypomania [abnormal excitement] and akathisia [severe restlessness].”

Using bogus labels with no medical or scientific diagnoses to back them up, psychiatrists are turning emotionally stressed mothers, who turn to them for help, into monsters who murder their own children.

October 2005: Relatives described Lashaun Harris as a devoted and loving mother whose life began spiraling out of control when she was labeled with a “mental illness” two years previously. A 23-year-old overwhelmed single mother, she sought help after the birth of her third child. She fell into the wrong hands, and they turned her into a killer.

Harris was labeled as “schizophrenic,” hospitalized and put on the same anti-psychotic drug that was the subject of the 1988 study linking it to increased hostile and violent behavior. Recently, she had stopped taking the drug - without medical supervision, and despite warnings that abrupt withdrawal can create new symptoms. Soon after, Harris stripped her three children naked, hoisted them over a safety rail and plunged them into San Francisco Bay's chilly waters.

November 2004: Dena Schlosser cut off the arms of her 11-month-old daughter, killing her. Schlosser had seen a psychiatrist and was hospitalized for “post-partum depression.”

October 2003: Rebekah Amaya, a 32-year-old Colorado woman, drowned her two kids in the bathtub. She had previously received mental health treatment.

May 2001: Texas mother Andrea Yates methodically drowned all five of her children in the family bathtub. Mrs. Yates had several suicide attempts, psychiatric treatments and was on antidepressants and antipsychotics. CCHR Texas obtained independent medical assessments of Mrs. Yates’ medical records. Science consultant Edward G. Ezrailson, Ph.D. reported that the cocktail of drugs prescribed to Mrs. Yates caused involuntary intoxication. The “overdose” of one antidepressant and “sudden high doses” of another “worsened her behavior,” Ezrailson said. This “led to murder.”

November 1997: Christina Riggs, a nurse, smothered her two children in their beds. Before suffocating her older child, she injected him with potassium chloride, the chemical used in death penalty executions. She had been prescribed an antidepressant after her marriage broke up.

October 1994: Susan Smith, a South Carolina mother, drowned her two children by driving her car into a lake. She had undergone family counseling and had been hospitalized in 1988 after her second suicide attempt.

No violation of human rights is greater than that which causes a mother kill her own child. No family should have to live through the horrors and traumas experienced by the Harris, Schlosser, Amaya, Yates, Riggs or Smith families.

From as early as 1990, CCHR asked the US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) for the inherent dangers in psychiatric drugs to be made evident to doctors, patients and patient families. CCHR worked exhaustively to make this data known. Finally the FDA issued the first “black box” warning for a psychiatric drug in October 2004.

This was followed by another 16 warnings and alerts from the FDA and other medical and regulatory agencies around the world. The recent CCHR White Paper, Report on the Escalating International Warnings on Psychiatric Drugs, documents each of these warnings, as well as providing recommendations for non-psychiatric treatments for those with emotional distress.

It is vital that CCHR increase their actions in making known the brutal and terrifying practices that are psychiatry and today’s “mental health care” system now, before they turn more mothers into killers. We are the only group in existence that can accomplish this. Contribute now and help the final stages of the museum renovation and reconstruction. The museum is the core of our message that psychiatry is the industry of death, and that we will not allow any more innocent people to become gruesome statistics of their failures to “help.” We are willing to do whatever it takes, but we need your donations to make this possible. Help get us back into our headquarters and the museum open and spreading the word that psychiatry kills.

You CAN make the difference. Defend and help save families from psychiatric drugs and despair. We need you to play a vital role in making known the dangers of these psychiatric “treatments.” We appreciate any donation you can contribute to this action. But, please, donate generously - otherwise, we will be paying the cost with our children. We must act now if we are to succeed. And we can succeed.

For donations of $2,500 or more, you can still be included on the museum Donor Wall.

It is imperative that we reach as many parents, groups, allies, policy makers and media as possible in order to bring about further safeguards and action by the voting body necessary for getting such psychiatric treatment outlawed.

Click here to donate online, or call 1-800-869-2247.

Or mail a check to:

CCHR International
6616 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90028

Sincerely,
Samantha Garcia
CCHR International

Note: This letter is copyrighted with all rights reserved. Photocopying, telefaxing, e-mailing, reproduction, distribution or quotation are strictly prohibited without the written permission of CCHR.

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