From Prozac to Parkland: Are Psychiatric Drugs Causing Mass Shootings?
If you develop digestive problems after a change in diet, do you look for the cause in foods you always ate or the new ones you started eating? While the answer is obvious, this common sense is painfully uncommon when analyzing the new phenomenon of continual mass shootings: Many blame the long-present “foods” — guns in this case — and ignore the new diet whose embrace coincided with the problem. And part of what’s new is the widespread use of psychiatric drugs.
As a case in point, the Parkland, Florida, shooter (I won’t use his name and help provide the fame he craved), who murdered 17 on Valentine’s Day, was on medication for emotional issues, his aunt related. This is now a familiar story, too. As WND.com’s David Kupelian put it, the following is par for the course: As information about a “perpetrator emerges, a relative confides to a newspaper that the ‘troubled youth’ who committed the mass murder was on psychiatric medications — you know, those powerful, little understood, mind-altering drugs with fearsome side effects including ‘suicidal ideation’ and even ‘homicidal ideation.’”
Yet, Kupelian laments, the media have little appetite for exploring this issue. Politicians don’t, either. Unlike guns, legal drugs aren’t a provocative issue that can be used to scare people and win votes. Moreover, as The Guardian reported last year, “Pharmaceutical companies spend far more than any other industry to influence politicians,” having poured “close to $2.5bn into lobbying and funding members of Congress over the past decade.” This dwarfs the “gun lobby’s” political contributions, mind you.
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