Harm - psychosis, seizures, suicide, homicide and dependency / addiction - was the subject of a two-day international medical-legal conference, October 4 and 5, in Philadelphia on "The Adverse Effects of SSRI Medications." Mark Taylor, gravely wounded in the Columbine massacre, was present with his mother, since both youthful killers had been receiving SSRI drugs.

The Conference
The meeting was organized by Donald H. Marks, M.D., Ph.D., an Alabama internist / microbiologist who had been Associate Director of Clinical Research at Hoffman-LaRoche, but now serves as expert witness for patients harmed by SSRIs and other prescribed drugs. It brought together victims of these medications and their relatives, attorneys suing the drug companies for making and selling them, and three psychiatrists.

The relatives and victims described their experiences and their efforts to bring them to public attention. The attorneys discussed ongoing lawsuits against drug companies and the criteria necessary for such suits to succeed; one has thus far. The psychiatrists focused on the larger picture: the irrelevance of these drugs for treating depression effectively, the outrageous efforts of the drug industry ("Big Pharma") to prevent adverse legal verdicts in law suits over their harmful side-effects, and its odious, ongoing and largely successful efforts to create new "mental illnesses" in order to sell more drugs.

Victims And Families
Mark Taylor, still alive, suffered less than others. Margaret Buffington of Omaha, described the agonies her beloved, industrious husband of 49 years suffered after being given Prozac for mild chest pain by a cardiologist who had found no heart disease. After several days of increasing restlessness and manic behavior, he hanged himself.

Jerry Jewell described his 26-year-old son Brooke Jewell, graduate of The College of Charleston, with a previously immaculate legal and personal record, who after being handed Paxil, returned two weeks later complaining of feeling great anger and asking, "when are these pills going to kick in?" The doctor replied, "Brooke, you just need to be patient because they won’t become fully effective until 4 or 5 weeks." Several days later, he raped a woman he did not know. He is now in prison for 21 years in South Carolina, where reactions to medically-prescribed drugs are not a defense in a crime. His sentence would have been much longer if the drug’s role had not been presented in court.

Leah Harris, psychiatrically diagnosed and drugged from the time she was seven, spent her childhood and adolescence in and out of hospitals, and made several suicidal attempts, the first shortly after being given Prozac. She finally made her way up into the real world, obtained a master’s degree in political science, and is now deeply involved in helping those the system harms.

Linda Hurcombe and Millie Kieve, from South Shropshire and Essex, England, respectively, crossed the ocean to report on the deaths of their daughters Caitlin, 19, and Karen, 29, from prescribed psychiatric medications. Caitlin committed suicide after taking Prozac for a few weeks for weight loss and feeling low; Karen died from an accidental fall caused by dizziness and other adverse effects of the many medications prescribed for her.

Joan Gadsby of North Vancouver, B.C., Canada, described her twenty years of addiction to prescription drugs, which involved arrests, several episodes of being restrained and involuntarily sedated - all from drug side effects - and her almost dying from an unintentional overdose. (She also pointed out that depression is the second leading cause for patients in Canada to see doctors, and has been, over the past five years, the reason for 36% of all doctor visits.)

Some of these victims now actively seek to save others from being similarly injured. Ms. Hurcombe, with the help of Dr. David Healy, the psychiatrist / historian of antidepressant development at the University of Bangor (North Wales), set up the "prozac and antidepressants alert networks" (PANTS). Ms. Kieve, in the London area, appalled also at the lines of children being given drugs in schools, organized the "Adverse Psychiatric Reactions Information Link" (www.april.org.uk). And Dr. Gadsby, long a tireless advocate for the accountability of prescribed psychiatric drugs (and who was awarded an honorary Ph.D. for her efforts), produced a TV documentary on "Our Pill Epidemic - The Shocking Story of a Society Hooked on Drugs" and just wrote a book, Addiction by Prescription.

The Attorneys
Attorney Andy Vickery, who won the first SSRI case against a drug company, described the Paxil-induced death of oil field worker Donald Schell. A federal jury in Cheyenne, Wyoming, returned a $6.4 million award against the drug-maker, GlaxoSmithKline, after finding that the drug "can cause some individuals to commit suicide and/or homicide," and that it specifically caused Schell to fatally shoot his wife, daughter and grand-daughter before he killed himself.

Vickery also detailed the data needed in court to prove a drug’s causal role. He described Milton Cole, happily married for 47 years, widely known for his woodworking talents, and joyfully anticipating retirement, who suddenly hanged himself after being given Prozac. Vickery defined the data necessary to prove causal relationship as including the victim’s marked increase in suicidal feelings, the unusual violence of the suicide itself, his obsessive and other abnormal behavior before the act, and its occurrence within 30 days of starting the drug.

Keith Altman, Esq., of the Fibonacci Group of Massapequa NY, analyzing the "adverse effects" of SSRI drugs reported to the Food and Drug Administration, described over 60,000 such reports on Prozac, which included 4,059 deaths. Paxil and Zoloft had, respectively, a third and a half as many reports, with a slightly smaller percentage of deaths. While these numbers may mean less than they seem because of the many people taking these drugs, it is noteworthy that a possible association with Prozac alone represents one-third of all drug-related suicidal attempts in the entire FDA data base since 1990.

Donald Farber, Esq., of San Rafael, CA, the lead counsel in a California federal district court suit against the makers of Paxil, involving a 35-year-old married father of two who killed himself after three days on the drug, received 8,000 inquiries from people claiming similar bad experiences after the suit was announced.

The Psychiatrists
After pointing out how depression had been very successfully treated in times past before the drugs with counseling/psychotherapy, I noted that depression is a symptom like fever, rather than a disease like pneumonia. The causes of depression are unique to each patient, and making depressive feelings the focus of treatment, rather than the causes of those feelings, can be compared to centering pneumonia treatment on fever-reduction, with drugs like Aspirin. In both cases, symptomatic relief and addressing real causes differ greatly.

I also presented a historic parallel to our government’s current endorsement of dependency-creating/addictive medications such as the SSRIs. An inexpensive and highly profitable method for producing opium was developed by the British East India Company early in the 19th century. Nearby China became a major market, and the drug eventually provided 10 to 15 per cent of all British India’s revenues. The Chinese government tried to suppress the trade but the British objected. In the Opium Wars which followed, the British fleet, aggressively supported by the opium traders, forced the Chinese government to legalize the trade - thus contributing immensely to that country’s subsequent demoralization. The Chinese government’s effort to stop the spread of this addictive drug contrasts sharply with the American government’s active encouragement (despite its "war on drugs") of the use of such substances when ordered by physicians.

Peter Breggin, M.D., author of Toxic Psychiatry, Talking Back to Prozac and other books, who has repeatedly appeared as plaintiffs’ expert witness in adverse-effect cases, described the drug companies’ tactics in such cases: when they seem about to lose, they settle the cases on condition that the settlement then be sealed. This prevents them from losing in court - with resultant negative publicity - and keeps information from the public about the harm the drugs can cause. Dr. Breggin emphasized particularly how the SSRIs transform ordinary depression into agitated depression, with, consequently, a much higher risk for violence - suicide or homicide. He also pointed out that Prozac is the only drug which produces mania in patients without a previous history of it.

Loren Mosher, M.D., former head of the schizophrenia research unit at the National Institute of Mental Health, presented little known information about Big Pharma - the drug industry. The third largest industry in the world, it spends some 40% of its revenues on marketing and 12% on "research and development" (most of it on new wrinkles for old drugs), and earns between 18 and 25% in annual profits. Permitted only since 1997 by the Food and Drug Administration to advertise directly to the public, the industry now spends $5.3 billion on such ads each year, and following 9/11, its advertisements increased 40% . After citing David Healy’s report that many of the drug articles in the medical literature are ghost-written by the drug companies themselves, Dr. Mosher noted that the sales of anti-depressants, including the SSRIs, have increased 800% since 1990, to a current level of $10.4 billion annually.

Dr. Mosher also described a meeting in Copenhagen he had just attended, allegedly devoted to research on the early prevention of schizophrenia. These studies involve giving "pre-schizophrenic" adolescents (whoever they may be) toxic anti-schizophrenia drugs, supposedly to prevent the full-blown disorder. To Dr. Mosher, these efforts demonstrate the drug companies’ basic strategy. First they find a new disorder - here "pre-schizophrenia" - then a new population - adolescents - then they define a drug for this group, and finally they target non-specialist physicians, general practitioners and family doctors, who will order the new medications. That strategy is already working most effectively with anti-depressants, most of which are prescribed by non-specialists.

The FDA’s Intervention
"Feds back drugmakers in suits like Columbine victims‘," the Denver Post reported on Sunday, October 6. After noting that Mark Taylor and dozens of others had filed suits against SSRI manufacturers, the Department of Justice told the courts that the Food and Drug Administration" has made repeated determinations that there is no scientific basis to show the drugs cause violence or suicide." Skip Murgatroyd, one of the attorneys at the Philadelphia meeting, said the "verdict in Wyoming was particularly scary to the drug companies. They have now pulled out all the stops. This is the FDA weighing in to eliminate all law suits."

The FDA says, however, it is getting involved to help the American public. It claimed, as the Denver Post pointed out, "that in one of the cases, Murgatroyd persuaded a federal judge in California to issue a preliminary injunction against Pfizer, which makes Zoloft, prohibiting Pfizer from engaging in allegedly false advertising claims, specifically TV ads that claimed Zoloft was not habit-forming. The FDA said that not only was there no evidence to back up Murgatroyd’s false advertising claim but that to disseminate scientifically unsubstantiated warnings could deprive people of beneficial, possibly life-saving treatment."

Vickery replied that while many people are helped by the drugs, a small sub-population are harmed. "It shouldn't happen that the cure harms the patient more than the disease itself."

Conclusion
The conference amply demonstrated the dangerous effects THAT SSRI anti-depressant drugs can have. Despite confirmation of that claim in one court of law, and, as compared to the general population, the 68% higher suicide rate among those given SSRIs in experimental trials, the Food and Drug Administration nevertheless claims that it "has made repeated determinations that there is no scientific basis to show the drugs cause violence or suicide."

Dr. Nathaniel S. Lehrman is former Clinical Director, Kingsboro Psychiatric Center, Brooklyn NY

Source: www.redflagsweekly.com