Police have yet to uncover a motive. [Stephen] Kazmierczak was an NIU graduate student in sociology in the spring of 2007, but was not currently enrolled, according to a release on the school’s Web site.
The Chicago Tribune reported that the school honored the gunman two years ago for his research on the U.S. prison system. The research included a study of self-inflicted wounds among prisoners.
“He was an outstanding student. An awarded student,” said NIU Police Chief Donald Grady. “Those he had communication with felt he was a very good student and a fairly normal, unstressed person.”
Grady said that Kazmierczak was a graduate student in social work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Kazmierczak was taking some kind of medication, Grady said, but declined to name the drug or provide other details.
“He had stopped taking medication and become somewhat erratic in the last couple of weeks,” Grady said.
http://www.cbs46.com/news/15304821/detail.html
When’s the medication going to be named? Who has the police chief chosen to serve and protect, and who to put in danger?
Eat or stop eating yer Prozac, Paxil, or Zoloft, and have uncontrollable urge to commmit suicide and mass murder?
Lilly fights journal article on Prozac
By Barry Meier
Published: TUESDAY, JANUARY 18, 2005Last year was an especially bad one for the pharmaceutical industry, which experienced controversies over how drug studies are disclosed and the implosion of the painkiller Vioxx.
Now, as a result of the recent publication of an article about the antidepressant Prozac, it appears that the staid, usually methodical world of medical journals could suffer its own black eye.
On New Year’s Day, BMJ, a British medical journal, published a news article suggesting that “missing” documents from a decade-old lawsuit indicated that Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac, had minimized data about the drug’s risks of causing suicidal or violent behavior.
The article’s appearance came shortly after a controversy erupted over whether drug makers had adequately disclosed the risks that antidepressants posed to pediatric patients. Meanwhile, Christopher Pittman, a teenager from South Carolina, is facing trial for murder as an adult on charges that he killed his grandparents when he was 12. Pittman has acknowledged the crime, but his lawyers contend that he became violent after taking Zoloft, an antidepressant similar to Prozac. . . .
It was in a little-noticed article written by Lenzer in the Dec. 11 issue of BMJ about the Pittman case that she first mentioned that the publication had received “a set of documents that mysteriously went missing from a U.S. mass murder case 10 years ago.”
That article did not go into details. But in her article Jan. 1, Lenzer wrote that the documents in question were connected to a Prozac-related lawsuit that grew out of a shooting rampage in 1989 by a Kentucky man, Joseph Wesbecker, that left nine people dead, including Wesbecker.
Lawyers representing the victims sued Lilly, asserting that Wesbecker’s killing spree had been caused by Prozac, a drug he had been prescribed just before the crimes. During the 1994 trial, Lilly pointed to Wesbecker’s history of psychological problems and said that Prozac was safe. To combat those assertions, plaintiffs’ lawyers introduced hundreds of Lilly documents. They argued that the records showed that Lilly had fully disclosed to the regulator in the late 1980s the potential of Prozac to produce suicidal thinking or acts of violence.
The jury found in favor of Lilly. But the plaintiffs and Lilly had reached an undisclosed deal just before the case went to the jury, effectively settling the case by agreeing not to appeal the verdict.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/01/17/business/lilly.php
When people try to withdraw from serotonin boosters — especially Zoloft, Paxil, and Luvox — they may experience debilitating withdrawal syndromes. Mistaking withdrawal for a return of their original symptoms, many patients restart the medication, needlessly prolonging their exposure to the drug. Pharmaceutical companies are so concerned about withdrawal syndromes that Eli Lilly recently funded a panel of drug advocates, prominent academic psychiatrists, who wrote a series of professional papers suggesting the euphemism “antidepressant discontinuation syndrome” as an alternative to “withdrawal,” avoiding the latter’s negative connotations.
In the case of suicidality and violence, Eli Lilly has adamantly denied this side effect. But new information has come to light that the pharmaceutical giant has paid millions of dollars to victims and survivors of Prozac-related suicides and murders. The test case was the sensational mass murder-suicide of Joseph Wesbecker. In 1989, one month after starting Prozac, Wesbecker opened fire with an AK-47 semi-automatic assault rifle in Louisville, Kentucky, killing eight people and wounding twelve others before taking his own life in the shooting spree. In 1994, Lilly appeared to win a jury verdict in the Wesbecker trial, which they aggressively publicized as “vindicating” their drug.
But the truth is that the pharmaceutical company secretly paid what Cecil Blye, an attorney for one of the victims, Andrew Pointer, later acknowledged was a “tremendous amount of money. It boggles the mind.”
http://www.simonsays.com/content/book.cfm?tab=1&pid=412061&agid=2
Eric Harris was taking Luvox (a Prozac-like drug) at the time of the Littleton murders
by Peter R. Breggin, M.D.
On April 29 the Washington Post confirmed that Eric Harris, the leader in the Littleton tragedy, was taking the psychiatric drug Luvox at the time of the murders. On April 30 the same newspaper published a story quoting expert claims that Luvox is safe and has no association with causing violence. In fact, Luvox and closely related drugs commonly produce manic psychoses, aggression, and other behavioral abnormalities in children and young people. . . .
http://www.breggin.com/luvox.html
Family Wonders if Prozac Prompted School Shootings
By MONICA DAVEY and GARDINER HARRISPublished: March 26, 2005
RED LAKE, Minn., March 25 – In their sleepless search for answers, the family of Jeff Weise, the teenager who killed nine people and then himself, says it is left wondering about the drugs he was prescribed for his waves of depression.
On Friday, as Tammy Lussier prepared to bury Mr. Weise, who was her nephew, and her father, who was among those he killed, she found herself looking back over the last year, she said, when Mr. Weise began taking the antidepressant Prozac after a suicide attempt that Ms. Lussier described as a “cry for help.”
“They kept upping the dose for him,” she said, “and by the end, he was taking three of the 20 milligram pills a day. I can’t help but think it was too much, that it must have set him off.” . . .
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/26/national/26shoot.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1111813290-IFJ7mBNwUjmN
8EWyvysSGQ
David Healey is a respected historian of psychiatry who has written a book that should spark a major debate. He identifies current trends towards the abandonment of independent research into treatments for mental illness, the demand for Randomised Control Trials as the only acceptable measure of whether a treatment works, and the chilling control pharmaceutical companies now exert over psychiatry.
There may be worse to come. US corporate “managed care” is moving into health systems throughout the world. . . .
Psychiatry’s championing of chemical treatments over all else began with the breakthrough drug chlorpromazine. It “completely eliminated the original form of insanity” from the 1940s onwards. The irony is, however, that in 2000 there has been a 15-fold increase in rates of admission to psychiatric wards compared to 1900.
Society’s reliance on psychotropic drugs may have produced further problems that have been mistakenly blamed on the disease rather than treatment. There have been numerous law suits in the US after patients on Prozac committed violent acts. “The rhetoric of modern drug development is powerful enough to blind clinicians to preventable deaths and obscure the fact that the life expectancies of their patients are falling,” writes Healy.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-creation-of-psychopharmacology-by-
david-healy-650506.html