It is a horribly sobering realization that the school shooting spree on April 20, 1999 at Columbine, Colorado, while devastating in its consequences, is only one incident in a tragic trail of incomprehensible acts of mayhem and murder. You need only read a newspaper or watch a television news broadcast to know that schools are not the only place these assaults have taken place. A review of media reports from the last fifteen years reveals that these incidents are also occurring on our highways, in restaurants, post offices, homes and factories from coast to coast. While the number of these incidents continues to escalate, a more disturbing fact is the increasingly bizarre nature of these pointless murders and suicides.
Acts of criminal violence have been with us since time immemorial but what we have been witnessing over the last couple of decades staggers the mind and assaults the senses. These grotesque acts, devoid of any possible sense of moral decency, strike us as completely incomprehensiblemothers blowing the brains out of their small children, fathers slashing their young children to pieces, employees calmly walking through their offices or factories murdering their co-workers, and young children going on maniacal shooting sprees in school yards.
As each new incident is reported, we sit in stunned horror in front of our television sets and wonder what is happening to our way of life.
How can we be at the dawn of the twenty-first century with technology hurtling us into a space age future and yet continue to find ourselves without a solution to the escalating number of acts of random, senseless violence? The reason is that we have been fed all manner of wrong reasons for why these tragedies have taken place and so they continue.
It is not guns that are the common denominator to these horrific eventssome occur with knives, axes and even automobiles. Nor is it clothing, age, gender or political orientation. The fact missed by most is that psychiatric, mind-altering drugs have been found to be the common factor in an overwhelming number of these acts of random senseless violence. These drugs, on an ever increasing rise in society and amongst schoolchildren, particularly over the last two decades, are actually creating acts of violence. In 1997, sales of psychotropic drugs topped $1.5 billion, double the figure of two years earlier.1 In short, the rise in senseless violence in America is date-coincident with the increased use of psychiatric mind-altering drugs.
Consider the following:
In the U.S. alone, there are now approximately four million children on the psychiatric drug Ritalin, a drug which the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) places in the same category (a schedule II narcotic) as opium, morphine and cocaine.2
Ritalin is the amphetamine-like drug widely prescribed to children for the contrived mental disease, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).3
Even Ritalin's manufacturer warns that frank psychotic episodes can occur with abusive use, while the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders states that the major complication of Ritalin withdrawal is suicide.4
If this were not bad enough, more than 909,000 children and adolescents between the ages of six and eighteen are on psychiatric antidepressant drugs.5
It is important to note that between 1988 and 1992 alone there were reports of more than 90 children and adolescents who had suffered suicidal or violent self-destructive behavior while on the newer antidepressant Prozac, an SSRI (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor).6
However, as the following will clearly show, the connection between psychiatric drugs, violence and suicide is far from being limited to children.
