How to Overthrow the Government by Arianna Huffington

Author:Arianna Huffington [Huffington, Arianna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Capitalism, Democracy, Civics & Citizenship, Political Ideologies, Political Science, Politics
ISBN: 9780061952166
Google: A1NQLkB_764C
Goodreads: 8612260
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2000-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

DRUGS → SHOOTINGS

On April 20, 1999, Dylan Klebold and his friend Eric Harris walked into their high school in Littleton, Colorado, and opened fire on their classmates, killing twelve students and a teacher before turning their guns on themselves. Buried in the saturation coverage of the Littleton massacre was the finding that traces of Luvox were found in Harris’s bloodstream. The presence of Luvox, the coroner said, “does not change the cause and manner of death.” Well, of course not—he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. But did the presence of Luvox change the cause and manner of Eric’s life?

Mania is defined as “a form of psychosis characterized by exalted feelings, delusions of grandeur…and overproduction of ideas.” That pretty much describes Harris’s Web site. “My belief,” he wrote, “is that if I say something, it goes. I am the law. If you don’t like it, you die.” This should have troubled any doctor who was following Harris after he was put on Luvox. Or was Harris one of the tens of thousands of children cavalierly put on antidepressants without either a proper psychiatric evaluation or any ongoing monitoring of side effects?

The news that Harris had been on Luvox came on the heels of the revelation the previous summer that Kip Kinkel, the Oregon school shooter, had been on Prozac. Later, Anthony “T. J.” Solomon, the Conyers, Georgia, school shooter, took Ritalin the morning of the shooting. Solomon is facing trial for wounding six students just weeks after the Columbine killings; Kinkel was sentenced to 111 years in prison after killing his parents and two schoolchildren and wounding twenty-two others. Kinkel and Solomon were only fifteen at the time. The antidepressants clearly did not exorcise these teenagers’ demons. The question is, did they embolden them?

“I have testified as a medical expert,” Dr. Breggin says, “in three teenage cases of murder and attempted murder in which antidepressants were implicated in playing a role. In one case a sixteen-year-old committed murder and tried to set off multiple bombs at the same time. The comparisons with Littleton are obvious and ominous.”

At a congressional hearing on media violence last spring, we were reminded that 95 percent of children are never involved in a violent crime. Most children whose parents own guns do not steal them; most children who watch Natural Born Killers do not go on shooting rampages; and most children on antidepressants do not kill their schoolmates. But while there is constant coverage about the dangers of guns and media violence, there is no debate about the dangers of antidepressants to the brains of our most vulnerable children, no campaign to examine kids for mood-altering legal drugs in their bloodstream the same way as they are examined for illegal drugs and alcohol.

In the aftermath of the Littleton massacre, President Clinton proposed new laws to restrict the marketing of guns to children, and hosted a conference to examine the entertainment industry’s marketing of violence to children. But no one planned a conference or introduced laws to deal with the third problem—the marketing of mood-altering prescription drugs for children.

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