Pills becoming the new marijuana on campus

[Richard]

By Elizabeth Cohen
CNN

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- The prescription drugs allegedly found in Al Gore III's possession this week are favorites among young people, according to drug abuse experts, who say prescription drugs may soon overtake street drugs in popularity.

Some young people perceive that prescription drugs are safer than street drugs, experts say.

"I wouldn't be surprised if right now at this point in time, there are more kids abusing prescription drugs than abusing marijuana," said Joseph A. Califano Jr., chairman and president of CASA, the National Center on Alcohol and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.

Gore was arrested on charges of possessing -- in addition to marijuana -- Vicodin, Xanax, Valium and Adderall.

According to a CASA report, between 1993 and 2005 the proportion of college students abusing Vicodin and other opiods went up 343 percent, about 240,000 individuals. The numbers increased 450 percent, or by 170,000 students, for tranquilizers such as Xanax and Valium, and 93 percent, or 225,000 students, for stimulants, including Adderall.  

Prescription drug abuse is particularly common among upper middle class students, according to Lisa Jack, a clinical psychologist at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

"It just goes to show that where you're from doesn't matter," Jack said.

And young people don't have to go far to get these drugs. "Prescription drugs are very easy for kids to get," Califano said. "They can get them from the Internet. They can get them from their parents' medicine cabinets. They can get them from their friends."

He said often students get them from friends who were prescribed these drugs legitimately.

"Kids sell them to each other," Jack said. "Drug trading happens all the time."

Experts say it's particularly a problem with Adderall, a drug prescribed legitimately to millions of young people with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

According to CASA, more than a third of children ages 11-18 in Wisconsin and Minnesota who'd been prescribed Adderall and other ADHD medications reported being approached to sell or trade their drugs.

And often they say yes, according to one Canadian study that found one out of four teens who'd been legitimately prescribed Ritalin gave or sold some of their drugs.

Another appeal to prescription drugs, besides the easy access, is that young people often perceive them as safer.

"They don't have to go to the streets and deal with some guy they don't know and get marijuana where they don't know what's in it," Califano said. "Also, they see their parents using these drugs, so they seem safe."

Jack said prescription drugs can be more challenging to treat than addiction to street drugs. "In traditional drug abuse, addicts can say, 'I've been using meth or coke or pot,' and an addiction specialist knows what to do," she said. But with prescription drugs, "sometimes the kids don't even know what they've been taking. They just pass the pills around."

Part of the solution would be for drug makers to formulate their products so they're harder to abuse, said Califano, adding that anti-drug campaigns also should focus more on prescription drug abuse.

Parents need to do their part as well, he said. "When I was a kid in Brooklyn, when parents had liquor, they locked up the liquor cabinet," he said. "Maybe parents need to lock up the medicine cabinet."

http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/07/05/dru...index.html

[Richard]

The shocking link between psychiatric drugs, suicide, violence and mass murder

WorldNetDaily.com

From Columbine to Virginia Tech, every time another headline-making mass murderer is discovered to have taken antidepressants or other psychiatric drugs, rumors and speculation abound regarding the possible connection between the medications and the violence.

Now, reports the July 2007 edition of WND's elite monthly Whistleblower magazine, the time for speculation and guessing is over. The evidence is overwhelming and irrefutable, says Whistleblower's groundbreaking investigative report: Mood-altering psychiatric drugs – taken every day by tens of millions of Americans, including millions of children – actually can push some users over the edge into mania, suicide and horrific violence.

The issue is titled "MANIA: The shocking truth about psychiatric drugs and their link to suicide, violence and mass murder."

To begin with, many of the most notorious mass killers in recent memory have been on, or just coming off, prescription mood-altering drugs. Remember these headline names?

Andrea Yates, in one of the most heartbreaking crimes in modern history, drowned all five of her children – aged 7 years down to 6 months – in a bathtub. Insisting inner voices commanded her to kill her kids, she had become increasingly psychotic over the course of several years.

Yates had been taking the antidepressant Effexor. In November 2005, more than four years after Yates drowned her children, Effexor manufacturer Wyeth Pharmaceuticals quietly added "homicidal ideation" to the drug's list of "rare adverse events." But "rare" is defined by the FDA as occurring in less than one in 1,000 people. And since, according to an Associated Press report, about 19.2 million prescriptions for Effexor were filled in the U.S. alone in 2005, that means statistically almost 20,000 Americans could experience "homicidal ideation" – that is, murderous thoughts – as a result of taking just this one antidepressant drug.

Columbine mass-killer Eric Harris was taking the widely prescribed antidepressant Luvox when he and fellow student Dylan Klebold went on a hellish school shooting rampage in 1999, killing 12 students and a teacher and wounding 24 others before turning their guns on themselves.

Dr. Peter Breggin, a top expert on the adverse effects of psychiatric drugs, has analyzed in detail "the clinical and scientific reasons for believing that Eric Harris's violence was caused by prescribed Luvox."

Beyond showing how meds like Luvox can cause "command auditory hallucinations" and many other scary, suicidal and homicidal "rare adverse events," Breggin cites Luvox manufacturer Solvay Pharmaceuticals as conceding that 4 percent of children and youth taking Luvox developed mania during short-term controlled clinical trials.

"Mania," explains Breggin, "is a psychosis which can produce bizarre, grandiose, highly elaborated destructive plans, including mass murder."

Authorities investigating Cho Seung-Hui, who murdered 32 at Virginia Tech in April, reportedly found "prescription drugs" for the treatment of psychological problems among his possessions. Joseph Aust, Cho's roommate, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch Cho's routine each morning had included taking prescription drugs.

And while the autopsy report says no drugs were found in Cho's bloodstream on the day of the murders, April 16, Breggin says Cho could well "have been tipped over into violent madness weeks or months earlier by a drug like Prozac, Paxil or Zoloft."

Cho's medical records have yet to be released to the public – authorities claiming it's because a criminal investigation is ongoing, while Breggin suspects "maybe they're protecting drug companies," citing the serious problems withdrawal from psychiatric drugs have been known to cause.

Patrick Purdy's 1989 schoolyard shooting rampage in Stockton, Calif., was the catalyst for the legislative frenzy to ban "semiautomatic assault weapons" in California and the nation. The 25-year-old Purdy, who murdered five children and wounded 30, had been on Amitriptyline, an antidepressant, as well as the antipsychotic drug Thorazine.

Kip Kinkel, 15, murdered his parents in 1998 and the next day went to his school, Thurston High in Springfield, Ore., and opened fire on his classmates, killing two and wounding 22 others. He had been prescribed both Prozac and Ritalin.

In 1988, 31-year-old Laurie Dann went on a shooting rampage in a second-grade classroom in Winnetka, Ill., killing one child and wounding six. She had been taking the antidepressant Anafranil as well as Lithium, long used to treat mania.

In Paducah, Ky., in late 1997, 14-year-old Michael Carneal, son of a prominent attorney, traveled to Heath High School and started shooting students in a prayer meeting taking place in the school's lobby, killing three and leaving another paralyzed. Carneal reportedly was on Ritalin.

In 2005, 16-year-old Native American Jeff Weise, living on Minnesota's Red Lake Indian Reservation, shot and killed nine people and wounded five others before killing himself. Weise had been taking Prozac.

In another famous case, 47-year-old Joseph T. Wesbecker, just a month after he began taking Prozac, shot 20 workers at Standard Gravure Corp. in Louisville, Ky., killing nine. Eli Lilly, which makes Prozac, later settled a lawsuit brought by survivors.

All very interesting, you may be thinking, but what do the drug companies say in their defense?

One of the most widely prescribed antidepressants today is Paxil, manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline.

Paxil's known "adverse drug reactions" – according to the drug's own 2001 FDA-approved label – include "mania," "insomnia," "anxiety," "agitation," "confusion," "amnesia," "depression," "paranoid reaction," "psychosis," "hostility," "delirium," "hallucinations," "abnormal thinking," "depersonalization" and "lack of emotion," among others.

With a rap sheet like that, no wonder pharmaceutical companies are nervous about liability lawsuits over the "rare adverse effects" of their medications. In 1998, for example, GlaxoSmithKline was ordered to pay $6.4 million to Donald Schnell's surviving family members after the 60-year-old man, just two days after taking Paxil, murdered his wife, daughter and granddaughter in a fit of rage.

But reporting the truth about the relationship between psychiatric medications and mass murderers is just the beginning. "MANIA" also reveals clear and compelling evidence that psychiatric drugs hurt children physically – causing shrinkage of their brains, damage to their hearts and other significant effects.

Perhaps even more disconcerting, "MANIA" exposes the federal government's bizarre preoccupation with screening all American school kids to see if they're mentally ill – a process that often leads directly to a prescription for mood-altering drugs for the child who didn't answer the questions properly.

"The problem," said David Kupelian, managing editor of WND and Whistleblower, "is that many Americans don't exactly trust the federal government to determine what constitutes 'mental health.'" Incredibly, as this issue reveals, there is even a government effort to proclaim an infant-and-toddler mental health crisis!

With the numbers of people taking prescription psychiatric medications in the tens of millions and growing every day, this issue will touch virtually every reader in a profound way.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/articl...E_ID=56536

[William]

  Ive seen this with my nephew.  they would send drug sniffing dogs into his school to find pot and such.  So the kids learned that they could hide pills instead.  seems that by doing something as making school safer from some drugs they have actually started them on harder drugs.

[GertrudaRose]

I'm always surprised at how much pain medication is passed out to me by doctors. If I took even a quarter of what they give me I'd be a vegetable!

The doctors all disagree with my method of pain management - meditation, relaxation, visualization, and distraction. But then again, when it is really bad, I'll break down and have a glass of wine or a cordial. Just one. That is just so much worse than all their drugs!

My point is that drugs are being pushed everywhere - doctors, pharmacies, television, etc!