- "I have killed my wife ... I got tablets from the
doctor yesterday and I think they were too strong." - David Hawkins.
-
- Manufacturers Pfizer find it "extraordinary"
but the anti-depressant drug Zoloft stands accused of murder. Deborah Cameron
and Allison Jackson report.
-
- A tiny, pale, bullet-shaped pill symbolically in the
dock alongside a confessed strangler, has been named by a Supreme Court
judge as the dark force in "a terrible act" of murder.
-
- The anti-depressant drug Zoloft is central to the story
of why David Hawkins, 76, snapped and strangled his 70-year-old wife.
-
- Nothing conveys the devastation of Hawkins so thoroughly
as the chilling tape that was played in court of his call to the police
emergency number.
-
- "I have killed my wife ... I got tablets from the
doctor yesterday and I think they were too strong. I went, I went absolutely
wild. I don't know. I was mad. I can't say any more ... I have got to go.
I am heading out and I am going to get rid of myself. Nobody, nobody can
help me now. Nobody can help me now. Look I've got to go. I'm shaking here.
I can't wait. I can't stop."
-
- Hawkins was not alone in his depression. According to
national figures, one in 15 adult and adolescent Australians has clinical
depression. Most commonly this major illness is treated with tablets -
8.2 million prescriptions were written in 1998, mainly for Zoloft, Prozac,
Aropax, Dothep and Endep.
-
- What is mysterious is the scale and severity of bad reactions.
-
- The Supreme Court quotes evidence from the Department
of Health and Aged Care of 510 Australian patients on Zoloft who reacted
badly, but the picture is very sketchy. The department will not release
comparative figures for other similar drugs and admits that reporting is
not mandatory anyway.
-
- The world's leading expert critic of Zoloft, Dr David
Healy, of the University of Wales College of Medicine, claims the 510 figure
is undoubtedly wrong and that between 5,100 and 51,000 would be more realistic.
The truth, he says, can never be known because patients keep their feelings
to themselves, fearing what will happen if they reveal murderous thoughts.
"Imagine that you are taking Zoloft and you start to have feelings
that you want to murder your children," Healy said from Canada yesterday.
-
- " How can you speak about it if you think that you
might get locked up?"
-
- Healy is a leading voice in the world debate about Zoloft
which, like Prozac, is a serotonin re-uptake inhibitor. Both the drugs
have been implicated in tragic crimes and suicides, mainly in the United
States. Among them are cases involving a 13-year-old boy who hanged himself,
a successful businessman who committed suicide and a proud grandfather
who killed his only granddaughter, his daughter, his wife and himself -
all, according to Healy, under the influence of Zoloft and drugs like it.
-
- Healy provided an opinion to the Supreme Court in the
Hawkins case saying the drug produced a "strange and unusual state
of mind" in Hawkins that directly led to the murder.
-
- "In my opinion had he not been taking Zoloft the
events of that night would not have happened," Healy wrote in the
opinion that was tabled in court.
-
- He is not surprised by the stance taken by the manufacturer
of Zoloft, Pfizer, which has stoutly defended the drug and called the Supreme
Court finding "extraordinary". The response of Pfizer's Australian
branch is consistent with the international corporate position of all the
major drug companies, which is to deny that the drug is culpable.
-
- Healy says there is fierce opposition to his views and
believes his opponents are behind a recent decision by the University of
Toronto to stop him from taking up a post there.
-
- Dr Bill Lyndon, the chairman of the committee for psychotropic
drugs and other physical treatments of the Royal Australian and New Zealand
Collection of Psychiatrists, said Pfizer needed to be frank about Zoloft.
-
- "The profession would expect a company in this situation
to make available any data they had on the drug," he said.
-
- While he did not suggest that Pfizer was hiding evidence,
he said doctors needed to be clear about anything that might adversely
affect patients.
-
- Lyndon said he was worried that the Supreme Court decision
might cause panic in patients who were taking Zoloft or other anti-depressants
and he warned them against stopping their medication without first seeing
their doctor.
-
- The NSW Health Complaints Commission has recorded two
episodes of patients criticising general practitioners who prescribed Zoloft.
One involved a woman who saw her GP for pre-menstrual tension and was prescribed
the drug, which made her suicidal.
-
- Commissioner Amanda Adrian said the drug should not be
prescribed lightly and that pharmaceutical companies needed to do more
to protect consumers.
-
- She said the lack of proper statistics on adverse reactions
was a grave concern to many close followers of the issue, including health
lobbyists who wanted to be able to report experiences more directly rather
than relying on doctors.
-
- "The obligation of the pharmaceutical companies
is probably higher because it is dealing with a therapy for a vulnerable
group of humanity," Adrian said.
-
- A New Zealand psychologist, who asked not to be named
for fear of repercussions from the drug industry, said he was "sickened"
by the failure of Pfizer to apologise to the family of Hawkins or promise
to review the safety of Zoloft.
-
- He said it was hypocrital of Pfizer to suggest Justice
O'Keefe reached his conclusion that Zoloft had caused Hawkins to kill his
wife after hearing only half the evidence.
-
- "For a drug company to blame this judgment on one-side
information is pathetically ironic. Delegates at [the Royal Australian
and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists] congress [in Canberra] were continually
bombarded with genuinely one-side marketing tactics all designed to do
one thing: increase our prescribing of their product regardless of the
side effects."
-
- O'Keefe's findings read as the strongest possible indictment
of its role in the crime.
-
- The murder, he said, was "a tragic reminder"
about the dangerous side-effects of Zoloft.
-
- Hawkins, a retired mechanic who lived with his wife,
Margaret, on their hobby farm near Tumbarumba, in southern NSW, had suffered
depression on and off since the 1970s. He first took Zoloft in 1996 after
the death of his youngest daughter, Christina, from breast cancer, and
then in 1999 when he became depressed over the sale of their property.
-
- Despite the doctor's orders not to take the drug until
breakfast the next morning, Hawkins took one tablet at 2am on August 1,
and when he didn't feel any better, he took four more.
-
- At 7.30am, as his wife prepared to light the fire, Hawkins
"went absolutely berserk" and strangled her with his hands.
-
- O'Keefe said the killing was totally out of character
for Hawkins, who had been in a loving relationship with his wife for almost
50 years.
-
- "I am satisfied that but for the Zoloft he had taken
he would not have strangled his wife," O'Keefe said.
-
- He ascribed no blame to the general practitioner, whose
notes, he said, were significant and who wondered whether Hawkins may have
been suicidal.
-
- Hawkins received a two-year minimum prison sentence but
because of time already served in remand he will be free in nine weeks.
-
-
-
-
- Comment
-
- From Sheryl Jackson
MoonFyre@thegrid.net
6-23-1
-
- These two cases alone should have sent the FDA reeling
and trying to coverup the facts about Doktors being allowed to prescribe
drugs for psychiatric disorders.
-
- Doktors go to school to learn about chemistry and ANATOMY.
Not about drugs and drug interactions or drugs that are out of classification
for regular MD's.
-
- When you consider that Doktors can graduate med school
with a D average, you have to ask yourself where do the smart ones go?
Beverly Hills? Pacific Palisades? Research?
-
- Then you have to ask yourself where the D average go?
Do you really want doktors prescribing your meds? Or should licensed Pharmacists
prescribe drugs because they went to school and learned drug interactions
and the human disease factor?
-
- It is hard to believe that the FDA made the company that
made CalBan 5ooo take it off the market when one lodged in a man's throat
and had to be removed at ER, when documentation about Prozac, Zoloft, Haldol,
and other Neuroleptic and Psytropic meds kill thousands world wide every
year.
-
- And these same DirtyRats are trying to make an HIV inoculation
that will PREVENT AIDS? I say, no, hell no. Not for me or my family.
-
- Prescribed drugs and doktors kill more people every year
than cars and alcohol do.
-
- People need to start writing to their congressmen and
legislators to prevent mandatory vaccines like for polio.
-
- By our silence we allow.
-
- Sheryl Jackson
-
-
- Comment
-
- From (name on file)
6-24-1
-
-
- I am taking Efexxor as I write this. Have been for about
three months. I have killed no one ... of any importance, that is. For
example, the fact that I've murdered my brother in law in cold blood has
nothing whatever to do with Efexxor. Or the Haldol I also take. Or the
Thorazine. Or that other stuff which is given once daily by sniffing through
my nose.
-
- I am not only sane, but I am a lot more than sane. My
life is improved with all these medications. I feel better longer. I am
losing weight (I am overweight) and my blood pressure is coming down for
the first time in a long time.
-
- They took my guns away yesterday at the recommendation
of my shrink, but I don't mind. After all, they know what they are doing.
And besides, I got some really wicked knives and other assorted weaponry
(including a claw hammer), dynamite, plastic explosives, some bombs I made
with .... never mind.
-
- So, in conclusion, I am well...I am fine! The fact that
I am also GOD has nothing at all to do with the drugs.
-
- I am who am,
AKA,
John Smith
-
-
- Comment
From (name wittheld)
6-24-1
-
- I think it would be only fair to have at least one comment
on this story bring up the fact that the man took an excessive amount of
the drug, in doses not prescribed by his doctor, nor recommended by physicians
or the company that manufactures them.
-
- If you must fault anything, perhaps the doctor who treated
Hawkins should have seen that the man was in need of more immediate help
than being put on a re-up inhibitor.
-
- I myself take Celexa, and before that, Manerix, and they
have done nothing but help me. Of course, I take the prescribed dosage,
at the right time, and balance it with proper follow up care from my doctor.
-
- Comment
-
- From Dr J S Chiappalone
- Annwn Newsletter dr.jc@austarnet.com.au
6-25-1
-
-
- This story underscores a number of points with which
I am sure you are aware:
-
- 1 The degree of mental disease in the world at
large as a manifestation of the Terminal Madness I have predicted.
-
- 2 The inadequacy of the Judicial Systems and Medical
Systems to cope with an ever-increasing problem whose pathogenesis they
do not understand.
-
- 3 The attempted obfuscation by archons, particularly
those controlling governments and drug companies whose greed for profits
overrides any consideration of Justice or true patient wellbeingness.
-
- 4 The overt danger of drugs, regardless of whether
they are legal or illegal, in allowing the various effects to occur in
the psyche of more and more spiritually non-viable consciousnesses which
are increasingly becoming disturbed by personal, intuitive cognizance of
a looming state of hopelessness.
-
- 5 The failure, at present, by health workers to
acknowledge the spiritual component of the reality which is impinging on
minds which cannot cope for they have been told to accept the delusions
of the Virtual Reality created on this Plane of Deception.
-
- 6 The futile, erroneous and surreptitious attempt
by drug companies and ignorant health care workers to reduce problems of
the Mental Plane and of the non-material consciousness residing in physical
bodies to simple chemical interactions in the body, an inert apparatus
which reflects the result of psychic activity and is not the cause.
-
- 7 The increasing frequency of demonic possession
of minds weakened and poisoned by inappropriate drug therapies which interfere
with the doorways of transmission of aspects of consciousness through the
centres of consciousness as I have explained in books such as `What's Going
On'.
-
- 8 The perverse contempt by this Evil Human System,
which is being totally compulsorily eradicated, as I have said often enough,
for whistle blowers and those who attempt to highlight the errors of a
doomed system.
-
- 9 The hint that the answers to the ever-increasing
and apparently insurmountable problems plaguing this generation are to
be found in the emerging True Gnostic Reality I have described before also.
-
- You may be able to see more points than these I have
hastily collated.
-
- At any rate, I wanted to highlight the fact that Medicine,
Science and human minds without the True Nous have no idea of what is going
on. The answers, as I have provided in such essays as "Terminal Madness
of the Endtime" are to be found on the spiritual basis of existence,
for the physical is undoubtedly scheduled to end very soon, and the problems
you see here are simply signs and symptoms of the Fragmentation Process
of the Endtime.
-
- ****
-
- Dr. J. S. Chiappalone ANNWN 2000 PO Box 714 Salmon ID.
83467, USA http://www.drjc.org
-
-
- Comment
-
- From Gayle Eversole
CRNP, PhD, AHG
www.leaflady.org
6-24-1
-
- Good Morning Jeff,
-
- This is just the tip of the iceberg.
-
- Although my work is in natural healing, I spent more
than 30 years in the medical field. For part of that time I worked as
a psychiatric nurse clinician. I provided therapy and medications for
a case load of 120 people. In many situations I was able to get some of
these folks off of their medications. There was one case in particlular
where the man had been institutionalized and over drugged for many years.
He gained a new life, and the out come was a real tribute to the positive
side of this work.
-
- People are now seeing the dark side of these drugs.
What many may not know is that one of the side effects of the SSRI's is
mania. In the withdrawal process, or the mixing of medications, as many
doctors seem to be doing today, an etablished side effect is homicidal
mania.
-
- These are dangerous drugs, and from my perspective, not
enough is truly known about how they act in an individual's biochemistry.
-
- Since comfrey is once again restricted in the market
place, it seems that the same should be done for these drugs until the
real truth can be presented.
-
- For more drug information a good reference is Rxlist.com
-
- Thank you for posting so many articles on this topic.
-
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