…and now they have a new weekly dose of prozac, which can be taken. We’ve also heard that the patent runs out for the stuff soon and another company says they are going to produce the stuff and sell it for half as much. Oh goody! Now the government can prescribe twice as much! May Heaven help US! (Ed.)

The late comic Groucho Marx, after throwing a coin into a fountain, was told he could make a wish.

“I wish I hadn’t seen that movie last night,” was Groucho’s wish. I’m one who understands an apparently wasted wish like that.

I wish I hadn’t learned that lesson in Newfoundland.

It was December 1956, and the Air Force was flying members of the American press over to Germany to cover the airlift of Hungarian refugees who were coming to the U.S. upon escaping communist Hungary after their failed Freedom Fight of October. In those days of propeller planes you had to land in Gander, Newfoundland, for refueling. The cold was describable only by a physicist, a meterologist or a poet. You could freeze stiff dashing in a heavy overcoat from the airplane fifty feet into the terminal building.

The ground crew inserted the gas hoses into the wings and started pumping. Never have I been so terrified in a plane on the ground. All of a sudden the entire wing was a blanket of flame. Not sparks, mind you; not little tongues of orange. WE WERE ON FIRE!

My first impulse was to scream and dash for the door. But I didn’t. Everybody else on that plane was Air Force brass or international reporters much more experienced than I. And every one of them saw exactly what I saw; whereupon they then continued reading or yawning or dozing, even though BOTH wings were by then covered with flame.

I figured, “What do I know? Maybe in temperatures this cold it’s normal for the wings to be covered with fire during refueling. I’m glad I didn’t throw a fit and make a fool of myself.”

The flames subsided, and we took off and made it to Munich without incident.

The message I gleaned from that adventure was “Trust your neighbors, not your eyes!”

I want to spend the rest of my life unlearning that message and replacing it with one that teaches: “Go ahead and yell like hell. If it’s a false alarm, sure, you’ll look a little foolish. If you’re right, though, you’ll be a big hero.” Good odds.

I now see another “wing on fire,” and this time I’m yelling as loud as I can.

Have the rest of you noticed how close to unanimously all the high school shooters, random killers, baby-drowners, first- and second-grade knife murderers, first-time committers of violence and unlikely suicides were on some kind of “anti-depressant” at the time of their dark deed?

• Sam Manzie, 15, attacked, raped and strangled to death an 11-year-old boy selling items door to door for the PTA. He was on Paxil.

• Kip Kinkel, 14, killed his parents and went on a shooting rampage at his Springfield, Ore., high school. He was taking Ritalin and Prozac.

• Jeremy Strohmeyer raped and murdered a 7-year-old girl one week after he started taking Dexedrine.

• Columbine High School’s Eric Harris was taking Luvox.

• T.J. Solomon, 15, who attended Heritage High School in Conyers, Ga., was taking Ritalin when he opened fire on his classmates, wounding six.

One of the most interesting is a case we can’t yet prove. In 1998, 13-year-old Mitchell Johnson and 11-year-old Andrew Golden opened fire on their classmates in Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Ark. Young Johnson had been seeing a psychiatrist but, when questioned as to the nature of his medication, if any, his attorney, Val Price, would say only, “That is confidential information, and I don’t want to comment on that.”

The crime America may never recover from, the studied and deliberate drowning of all five of her children by a mother in Texas, was performed under the influence of “anti-depressants.”

So was the incredible stabbing murder of eight Japanese children in the first and second grades by a man on anti-depressants.

As was O.J. Simpson when the double murder many believe he committed occurred.

Please understand I’m not reaching out for every verifiable case I can muster so I can stuff this sausage to make it seem convincingly fat. Quite the opposite. I have not found ONE single case of irrational, motivationless killing that did not include some kind of mind-tampering drug.

Please, don’t come back at me now with medication-free jealous lovers who kill or road-ragers, angry dads at Little League games, drug dealers in deals that went bad, or hostile teens whose sneakers have been dissed by dudes from the wrong part of town. Repeat: I’m talking about IRRATIONAL, MOTIVATIONLESS killing.

If there were as much evidence that the Brooklyn Bridge were unsafe for traffic as there is that the anti-depressant medications that are being shoveled into troubled Americans today cause indiscriminate mass murder and suicide, New York Mayor Rudolph Guiliani would close the bridge down within 35 seconds.

But what about the troubled people who swear their lives were saved from suicide or psychotic ruination by these very drugs that have been known to propel others to murder and suicide?

There’s an interesting fact emerging. Shame on us if we don’t seize it and use it.

Those who are helped by Prozac and the other drugs must wait six weeks before the benefits kick in. The murderous and suicidal results, however, can happen almost immediately.

• A jury in Wyoming just awarded six and a half million dollars to the survivors of a man who hauled off and killed his wife and two children after only two Paxils. It couldn’t have been more dramatic. The defense attorney asked the jury, “Do you believe this man could have done what he did after taking only two pills?” The jury voted “yes.”

• A woman in New York who was a valuable “half-way” victim of Prozac described it valuably. “I was in depression after I gave birth to my son,” she said. “When I started to tell the doctor my problem, he had already written out a prescription for Prozac before I even got to the ‘N’ sound in ‘depression.’ No examination. No questions. No profiling. Just ‘Here. Take this!’

“After taking a few, I experienced an increasingly powerful desire to go down into the New York subway system and throw myself in front of a train,” she reported. “Fortunately, I had enough of my real self left to decide I could never, ever go down into the subway.

“I called the doctor to complain, and he was too busy to talk to me at that moment, but his nurse whispered: ‘Throw that stuff down the toilet. Don’t ever take it again. It’s a terrible drug!’ ”

She didn’t take any ever again. And now, thank God, she’s fine.

It may be inconvenient, expensive, awkward, and in the minds of many, too damned much trouble, but, since the bad effects occur early, EVERYBODY ON THESE DRUGS SHOULD BE SEQUESTERED IN A HEALTH FACILITY FOR THE FIRST THREE OR FOUR DAYS OF TREATMENT.

Those who evidence no dire effects may be allowed to continue outside. Those who fantasize about subway trains, kitchen knives, guns, bombs and brimming bathtubs should be held until the drug effects have passed through their systems.

We sequester juries because letting them roam about their normal lives might taint a verdict.

Why not then sequester takers of anti-depressants if the effects of those medications might trigger murder, suicide or both?

Those who think things today are, yes, troublesome, but who haven’t joined me on these ramparts of rebellion, have to answer the following question.

Why, in the 1930s and 1940s was there plenty of depression – post-partum and otherwise – AND EVEN GREATER AVAILABILITY OF HANDGUNS ACROSS MOST OF THE COUNTRY, but almost no murders without reason or suicides of the unlikely? Our current bright-and-dark rainbow of “anti-depressants” did not exist.

Nothing but silence has answered that question so far.

And come now. Are you really going to put on that pensive expression for a few moments and then say, “The facts are unrelated“?

I have, as you’ve seen, little to offer but alarm. The journalism schools used to teach “An editorial criticism that does not offer a solution is worthless.”

And they would cap their case with that old Eleanor Roosevelt chestnut that said, “It’s better to light one candle than curse the darkness.”

I hope they’ve packed that one up and put it away.

Our job instead is to find people who are a lot better at cursing the darkness.

Published on DrKelley.info, July 24, 2001. Embedded links (if any) may no longer be active. (Ed. 12.31.10)

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