Mass Shootings: An Answer

There is NO cure-all to stop mass shootings.

In the wake of the slaughter in Parkland, Florida, once again Americans seek answers. Doing away with all guns would be wonderful IF legal, IF possible, IF practical. But that answer is “none of the above.” So what do we do?

One of the “cures” bandied around has been regarding control of those mentally ill to prohibit their getting guns in their hands. Certainly that might work. And if a process of doing so was successfully implemented it would no doubt stop some of these shootings.

There is another “angle” in the mental health discussion: pharmaceutical drugs. For pretty much every mental health patient — especially those whose conditions are determined by medical doctors to be severe — prescription drugs are prescribed. There are plenty of medical doctors who feel strongly that the misuse (and in some cases simple the “use”) of those pharmaceuticals if not instigate at least play a major role in most of these shootings. Let’s hear from one of those doctors.

NOTE: At dnewman.org we do NOT endorse or recommend the works or services of any individual, group, or company of which we report, including the following doctor. We present these reports to our members for their consideration. As always we encourage you to read this report, do your own research, and make informed decisions for yourself and your family. Tomorrow we will present to you a second solution for mass shootings — this from ANOTHER doctor. Be certain to look-in tomorrow morning.

Dr. Rima E. Laibow, MD is the Medical Director of the Natural Solutions Foundation. She is a graduate of Albert Einstein College of Medicine (1970) who believes passionately in the right every American to choose a personal health path that is free of government or corporate interference. Dr. Laibow is the President of the NeuroTherapy Certification Board which she helped establish in order to strengthen and develop the field of NeuroBioFeedback and bring it into wide-spread use as a powerful, non-toxic tool for modern medicine.

Letter to Students at Stoneman Douglas High School: Parkland Florida from Dr. Laibow, MD

“My heart goes out to you in this time of tragedy. As a psychiatrist for nearly a half century, I have some idea of what you are experiencing it and I am so sorry for your pain and distress. I, along with the Natural Solutions Foundation, of which I am the Medical Director, stand with you and your activism. You need to fight to end school shootings and other senseless murders and we need to fight right along-side you, as, in fact, the Natural Solutions Foundation and I have been doing for a long, long time. That is probably the only thing that we can do to fix the problem of school massacres: fight for the freedom to live and grow in a safe and sane world. But you are fighting the wrong enemy for the right thing.

ALL PSYCHIATRIC DRUGS MUST HAVE “BLACK BOX” WARNINGS

        Rima E. Laibow, MD

One American in six is on psychiatric drugs, which the FDA requires to have a “black box” package insert warning, its highest alert level, stating that both homicide and suicidal ideation, along with violence, are recognized side effects of these potentially lethal drugs. Your friends were killed by, and you were forever traumatized by, drug-induced lethality which happened to use a gun.More than a million kids under six are on these brain-battering drugs. By 2014, 8.4 million kids under 17 were on these drugs and those numbers have risen, and risen sharply, since then.

Unlike those who, unscientifically, believe there is a role for these dangerous drugs in therapy I believe that there is no such legitimate role. Whether there is a role for them or not, the uncontested, well-established and incontrovertible fact is that they frequently induce serious side effects INCLUDING HOMICIDE AND SUICIDE ALONG WITH OTHER ACTS OF AGGRESSION! We are not talking about “micro-aggression” here; we are talking about lethal aggression.

That means that people on psychiatric drugs are somehow chemically induced — “poisoned” is not a bad word for it — to believe that it makes sense to, for example, pick up a rifle and kill fellow classmates as quickly as they can pull the trigger.

This is not a theory or a hypothesis. This is such a well-established fact that the FDA requires a “black box” warning to precisely this effect, on each and every one of these drugs. The manufacturers are not at all happy to have that warning there but they can rest easy: such warnings are almost totally ignored as if they were not there.

DID YOU READ THE “BLACK BOX” WARNING?

If you were prescribed one of these psychoactive drugs, did your doctor tell you these dangers? Did you or your parents read the package insert? Yet a 2009 peer reviewed, mainstream journal study shows a quarter of all kids on drugs such as Paxil and Zoloft become dangerously violent and/or suicidal. How can you give “Informed Consent” to using one of these drugs without knowing that?

Another study in 2011 and another in 2014 and another in 2015 and another in 2016 all conclude with this type of information: taking these drugs, young people especially are significantly vulnerable to aggressive, suicidal and homicidal thoughts and actions. Significantly, not rarely. This was, once again, shown in a recent paper by Professor Peter C Gotzsche, MD, called“Suicidality and aggression during antidepressant treatment: systematic review and meta-analyses based on clinical study reports” published in the very mainstream British Medical Journal. Dr. Gotzsche and his colleagues reached that conclusion after reviewing and including 76 trials with 64,381 pages of clinical study reports for 18,526 patients. All of the trials showed the high incidence of dangerous thoughts and behaviors. All of them.

THE CURRENT FOCUS IS GUNS, GUNS, GUNS,
NOT DRUGS, DRUGS, DRUGS.
WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!

How many of you, recently traumatized or otherwise dealing with life’s issues, are currently on psychiatric drugs? And what happens if these drugs turn you into someone thinking about suicide or homicide, or, worse, acting on either of those tragic options? One in six of you on drugs — or more — will experience that. Some proportion of you experiencing it will try to act it out and some tragic percentage will succeed. Guns or not.

God forbid, my friends, but for those who do, it was not the guns or the vehicles or the ropes or the belts or the knives or the razor blades: it was the drugs. The instrumentality of the violence is not its cause. The cause is in the mind of the person, not inherent in the tool [s]he uses. And when that mind is misinformed by use of chemicals known to promote violence, the tragic results are sadly inevitable and will repeat. And repeat, and repeat and repeat.

Wikipedia, that lover of facts (some true, some not, as it happens) has a page listing school massacres by victim numbers. But nowhere does that massacre message list the drugs that the shooters were taking. Why not? Because drug use and the supposed “safety” of those drugs is a well-fed Sacred Cow: we give drugs, we never question what they do! That drug impact information is easily available and it shows a frighteningly high percent of all mass killings are linked to “properly prescribed” psychiatric drugs.

ACTIVISTS MUST QUESTION EVERY SACRED COW

And this one is a killer, far more lethal than the much-publicized Mad Cow Disease. This one was lethal for 17 of your friends and classmates and teachers and deeply damaging to you. And will be again, in another school, in a terribly short time, unless we corral it and stop feeding it! We need to stop feeding ourselves drugs that distort thinking and feeling and, ultimately, kill.

As a mother, a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and a compassionate human being, I am truly sorry for your many losses this past Valentine’s Day. Your trauma, your loss of innocence, of the perception that the world is a safe place, the lives lost, are bells that can never be un-rung and you will hear their pealing in your hearts for the rest of your lives.

You are calling for something to be done, and for that, as an activist and a member of society, I salute you. However, you are calling for the wrong thing. The gun killed and wounded, but the mind(s) of the gunman (or gunmen), poisoned by psychiatric drugs, was the reason that the gun was used to kill and wound. The cause precedes the effect.

Every school shooter we know about, every single one, was either on legal, doctor-provided powerful, destructive, mind-altering psychiatric drugs or just coming off them. Every single one.

Consider:

  • Columbine mass-killer Eric Harris was taking Luvox (Fluvoxamine maleate) — like Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor and many others, a modern and widely prescribed type of antidepressant drug called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs. He and fellow student Dylan Klebold shot 13 people to death and wounded 24 in a headline-grabbing 1999 rampage. Less well known is that Luvox manufacturer (Solvay Pharmaceuticals) admits that during short-term controlled clinical trials, 4 percent of children and youth taking Luvox — that’s one in 25 — developed mania, a dangerous and violence-prone mental derangement characterized by extreme excitement and delusion.
  • 1988, Laurie Dann (31) killed one child and wounded 6 in a shooting rampage in a second-grade classroom in Winnetka, Ill. She was taking antidepressants Anafranil (Clomipramine) and Lithium.
  • 1989: Schoolyard shooter Patrick Purdy (25) murdered five children, wounded 30 in a schoolyard shooting rampage in Stockton, California. He was taking the antidepressant Amitriptyline (sold as Elavil), and antipsychotic Thorazine (Chlorpromazine).
  • 1989: Joseph T. Wesbecke, (47) shot 20 workers at Standard Gravure Corp. in Louisville, Kentucky, killing nine. He was taking Prozac (Fluoxetine). Prozac-maker Eli Lilly later settled a lawsuit brought by survivors.”
  • 1997: Michael Carneal (14) went to Heath High School in Paducah, Kentucky and killed 3 students, paralyzing one during a prayer meeting. He was taking stimulant Ritalin (Methylphenidate).
  • 1998: Kip Kinkel (15) murdered his parents, went to Thurston High, Springfield, Oregon, and opened fire on his classmates, killing two and wounding 22 others. He was withdrawing from antidepressant Prozac and stimulant Ritalin.
  • 1999: Eric Harris (18) and Dylan Kiebold (17) killed 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School, Colorado before committing suicide. Harris was withdrawing from antidepressant Luvox.
  • 2004: Aaron Ray Ybarra (26) allegedly opened fire with a shotgun at Seattle Pacific University killing one student and wounding two others.” He was taking antidepressant Prozac and antipsychotic Risperdal(Risperidone).
  • 2013: Jose Reyes (12) killed 2 people and wounded two others with a shotgun at his Sparks, Nevada school. He was taking antidepressant Prozac.
  • 2013: Aaron Alexis (34) killed 12 people at the Washington, DC Naval Yard and then himself. He was taking antidepressant Trazodone (sold as Desyrel).
  • 2005: Jeff Weise (16) shot and killed nine people and wounded five others before killing himself on the Red Lake Indian Reservation, MN. He was taking antidepressant Prozac.
  • 2007: Seung-Hui Cho, a student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University killed 32 people and wounded 17 others on campus. He was taking Prozac.

PSYCH DRUGS KILL – GUNS ARE THE EXPEDIENT!

The real murder weapon is the rampant and irresponsible use of the many psychiatric drugs prescribed as if they were safe and necessary. In fact, they are neither.

I have practiced Child, Adolescent and Adult Psychiatry for nearly 50 years without ever prescribing a drug, psychiatric or otherwise. Why? Because I know that there are non-pharmaceutical ways to help, rather than poison, people, and I use them. These include homeopathics, herbs, food, nutrients and a host of other non-toxic methods. They work and they do not have, or need, “black box” warnings.

May you find peace and solace in joining with your loved ones to bring this unnecessary and tragic slaughter to an end.”

Yours in health and freedom,

Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation

2 thoughts on “Mass Shootings: An Answer”

  1. Although these drugs probably are helpful to many, it must be understood that it is a game of Russian Roulette. They should be used as s last resort instead of a quick fix as is usually the case.

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