Since when has homicide become an acceptable side effect to a medication?!!

Dr. Ann Blake Tracy's commentary on the David Ragsdale case:

Combine simple math and common sense (which is far from common any longer!) and you have the answer that Grosser, Peterson, Paulson and Yau were unwilling to venture a guess as to whether David Ragsdale's medications could have caused him to kill his wife.

1. Recent research shows that antidepressants are of no more benefit than a sugar pill yet have page after page of adverse reactions along with reports of terrible withdrawal.

2. Look at package warnings for antidepressants and you find the most commonly prescribed antidepressant currently, Effexor, has the warning of "homicidal ideation" - obsessive thoughts of killing and how to kill.

Significant to note is that the company kept the data hidden for over 10 years before adding this to the drug information, leading one to ask just how many other manufacturers of antidepressants with different brand names, yet with similar action in the brain, are still hiding that information about their drugs?

(Next our society must ask ourselves, "Since when has homicide become an acceptable side effect to a medication?!!")

3. In August Dr. Thomas Insel, head of the National Institute of Mental Health admitted that antidepressants produce the same effect as Ketamine, a sister drug to PCP, and a dissociative anesthetic, yet they take a little longer to produce that effect. PCP and Ketamine are now known to produce psychosis coupled with incredible violence although they were initially thought to have "a large margin of safety in humans."

4. There is case history: Turn to the Donald Schell case in 2001 in WY. After consuming only two pills of one antidepressant, Paxil, which David Ragsdale was taking, this mild mannered loving husband and father shot his wife, daughter, infant granddaughter and then himself. After hearing all the evidence (the most damaging coming from the Paxil manufacturer's own expert) the jury ruled that the consumption of two Paxil pills was the main cause of this tragedy and awarded $6.4 Million to what was left of this family.

5. We have absolutely no idea what two drugs mixed together will do because they are never tested together, only individually. And we certainly have NO IDEA what taking 7 medications can do when mixed in a human body or brain!

6. Simple math: As Scott Peterson was candid enough to admit one drug taken with another can multiply the response, as well as side effects, by 10 times - exactly what Paxil and Doxepin do taken together. Multiply any of the possible side effects listed for either Paxil or Doxepin by 10 times and you see the extreme likelihood of medication-induced psychosis, mania, amnesia, seizure, etc.

Nurse Tamara Ragsdale, David's sister, listed the adverse effects produced by these drugs as "manic reaction, suicide, homicidal tendencies, hallucinations, delusions, psychosis, amnesia, panic and seizures." All one needs do is pull up the product information on each of these drugs and find those listed for most of the 7 mind altering medications David was taking.

One last point brought up by Dr. Grosser is that cases like David Ragsdale's are being trumpeted "as a demonstration of how dangerous these drugs are." I will agree that these case reports are exactly what gets any drug pulled from the market. And just as it was the missing arms and legs of the babies born to moms taking Thalidomide that kept that drug off the market in the US, it will be the Utah murder cases of David Ragsdale, Sergi Babarin, Sharon Al-Shimmary, Gloria Clements, Margaret Kastanis, JC Gardner, Debbie Loiselle, Ronald Cunningham, Mark Ott, Lenny Gall, Carl Lindeman, Christopher Jessop, Mitchell Sawaya, Brian Christopher Sullivan, Darrell Kinyon, Scott Ellison, Claudio Martinez, Art Henderson, etc., etc., etc. (www.drugawareness.org), not to mention the cases nationwide and worldwide, that will pull these deadly drugs from the market.

But beyond the homicides, another factor for their withdrawal will be all the suicides and the all too often fatal birth defects related to the heart and lung damage in the offspring born to moms who take these drugs.

[WARNING: The FDA has warned that any abrupt change in dose of an antidepressant can produce suicide, hostility or psychosis!]

Ann Blake-Tracy, PhD, Executive Director,
International Coalition for Drug Awareness
www.drugawareness.org & author of Prozac:
Panacea or Pandora? - Our Serotonin Nightmare