It turns out that Dylann Storm Roof, aside from having parents whose naming privileges should have been revoked, was on suboxone or had recently come off it when he killed nine people in Charleston. This isn’t the first time a serial killer has been on “legal” psychotropic drugs manufactured and marketed by Big Pharma. In fact, one of the only common ties between almost all serial killers is Big Pharma:
According to a data set of U.S. mass shootings from 1982-2012 prepared by Mother Jones magazine, of 62 mass shootings carried out by 64 shooters, the majority of the shooters (41) were noted to have signs of possible mental illness — the precise kinds of mental illnesses that psychotropic medications are prescribed for.
As you all know, correlation is not causation. It’s possible that all these people were on psychotropic medications because they were crazy, and their craziness (and not the drugs) are to blame. Fair enough.
But we should also take into account the huge number of stories of people who began acting quite erratically only after they started dosing on Big Pharma meds. Concerning suboxone alone, there is quite a large forum of users on subsux.com who chart anecdotal evidence of the drug’s vicious psychological and physical side effects.
And Big Pharma is aware of these side effects. They just aren’t willing to drop their cash cows. They’ve been pushing drugs on kids, trying to de-stigmatize and expand diagnoses of mental illness, and getting psychiatrists to prescribe drugs as a first remedy for even mild “depression.”
Further, it is very likely that some of these drugs are creating psychotic effects by altering a doser’s brain chemistry. When and if a “patient” tries to get off anti-depressants or anti-psychotics, the effects of withdrawal can create “episodes” even more severe than the original symptoms. But Big Pharma won’t stop. Instead, they’ll just prescribe more and more drugs as correctives:
It’s called polypharmacy and it is increasingly popular: Prescribing several drugs–often as a cocktail–that are supposed to do more than the drugs do alone. Big Pharma likes polypharmacy for two obvious reasons: drug sales are tripled or quadrupled and it is not possible to know if the drugs are working. It is reminiscent of the joke about the business owner who says, “I know that half of my advertising is wasted–I just don’t know which half!”
Of course the problems with polypharmacy parallel its “benefits.” The person can’t know which, if any, of the drugs are working so they take them all. By the time someone is on four or more psychiatric drugs, there is a good chance they are on a government program and we are paying. There is also a good chance the person is on the drugs for life because withdrawal reactions make them think there really is “something wrong” with them and it is hard to quit the drugs.
That’s terrible news. I would like to see people take a much longer and harder look at psychotropic drugs, and it would be nice if our culture would stop looking for quick fixes to psychological problems. The quick fixes Big Pharma has been peddling have produced nothing but more long-term brokenness.