Prescription drugs are connected to school shootings and other violence, yet more drugs are touted as the solution

Monday, September 11, 2006 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: school shootings, side effects, prescription drugs

The United States is gaining a reputation around the world for raising children who go on school shooting rampages. Earlier this year, we had another one with 16-year-old Jeff Weiss, who went into his school on an Indian reservation and blew away 10 friends. And guess what? He was taking the antidepressant Prozac.

Once again we see the link between antidepressants and violent behavior. I was raising the alarm about this in 1999 following the Columbine schools shootings. At that time we knew that those students were on antidepressant drugs, but the rest of the world didn't take any notice of it. The rest of the world said, "These drugs are completely safe. They keep these kids happy and in a normal state so they don't feel depressed." What they actually do, though, is detach these kids from reality to the point they can go on shooting rampages and not even have a clue that they're affecting the lives of real people. It basically transforms the world into a video game that these kids play out.

It makes it very easy for them to cross that threshold and begin to display violent behavior. We've seen this in the studies and finally, after years and years of pounding this issue, some of it has started to come out in the popular press. We're seeing a lot of warnings now about antidepressant drugs and their ability to cause violent behavior. We're seeing some of these drugs pulled off the market. And slowly we're beginning to see the general public recognizing the link between antidepressant drugs in our youth and violent behavior, including school shootings.

Back in 1999, they blamed guns. So if the students had picked up knives and stabbed people to death, it would have been a knife problem? Give me a break; it's not a knife problem, or a gun problem… it's a medication problem. These schools are supposed to be drug-free zones, and yet half the kids are doped up on antidepressants and Ritalin. How is that drug-free?

If you're going to alter the brain chemistry of these children, you had better be prepared for the results. The result we're seeing now is mass killings. Elsewhere around the world, where children aren't doped up on all these drugs, we don't see this kind of behavior. This is what happens when you change children's brain chemistry; you get these results.

Now, you can talk about other factors that may be involved. We can talk about violent video games, for example, and how some of these first-person shooter games are potentially training simulators for violent and aggressive behavior. However, I think you can only push that argument so far. If a child can distinguish between a video game and reality, then he's not going to be running around shooting people in the real world just because he played a video game.

That doesn't mean these video games are healthy. I would certainly prefer that children played something a little less violent, but I don't think you can blame the video games for this behavior. You've got to go to the brain chemistry. It's when you alter the brain chemistry that bad things start to happen.

Boosting brain health with nutrition

Now, are there healthy ways to alter brain chemistry? Of course there are. Fundamentally, this is actually a nutritional problem. If a child is depressed, or if he or she is suffering from so-called ADHD -- which is a completely fictional disease, by the way -- you can resolve the vast majority of these issues by making changes in their diet.

As much as 80 percent of children diagnosed with ADHD can be completely free of the "disease" in a matter of weeks just by taking certain metabolic disrupters out of their diet -- most notably, refined sugars and refined grains, such as white flour and artificial food colors. Imagine how healthy children's nervous systems could be if we fed them good nutrition. What if they had some supergreens or just some basic vitamins, minerals and whole food concentrates? What could we do for the health of their brains?

They would have stable moods, they would have non-aggressive behavior, and they would be more creative and more willing to learn. We could raise a whole generation of healthy, intelligent children if we started with nutrition, because the brain and nervous system are physical organs. People forget that. The brain is a physical organ, and just like any physical organ in your body, if you don't give it the right nutrients, then it won't function properly.

Trying to raise a normal child without nutrition is akin to running a car without oil

It's sort of like trying to run your car without any oil in it. I know that's a crude metaphor, but some people get the point that way. You have to have good nutrition for the brain; that means B vitamins and lots of minerals -- magnesium, zinc, calcium and the trace minerals as well. You have to have the phytonutrients, the pigmentation in these foods -- the blues in the berries and the reds in the tomatoes and peppers, the orange in carrots and so on.

The colors of foods are actually potent phytochemicals, and these colors have highly protective effects on the nervous system. They also boost immune system function in the body and can help reduce arthritis and inflammation. They have a lot of beneficial effects in the body, yet children today are growing up on mostly processed foods and junk foods.

You probably remember what you ate as a teenager. It's an atrocious diet. I know mine was a terrible diet. I can't believe I made it to the age of 25 based on what I was eating then. But some kids aren't making it, and they're not making it because they lack the basic nutrition they need to have healthy functioning nervous systems.

So what does this organized medicine and psychiatry do to combat this problem? It doses teenagers up on prescription drugs as if drugs are the answer to every problem. Then they have another answer when these kids go out and shoot each other. The answer, then, is prison time. "We'll lock these kids away because they're dangerous to society."

Instead of spending a few dollars on nutrition to raise a healthy, balanced human being with a functioning nervous system, we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars, over the life of this person to keep them incarcerated. We build more prisons. We put them on more drugs, and we do nothing to create a productive member of society.

It only takes a few dollars worth of nutrition each month to support a healthy child. Of course, there's more to it than just nutrition; there are things like good parenting, a great living environment, a challenging learning environment and so on. But in terms of the nutritional aspect, it only takes a few dollars. Nutrition doesn't have to be expensive.

Investing in the health of our children is a bargain

To cover the nutrition basics only costs a few dollars a month, and that investment would pay off so much in our society. It would be returned many times over very quickly because every kid that we can save from the prison system and give a new opportunity, in terms of being able to learn and take on a skill and have real job opportunities out there, produces a windfall of returns for society. That child is going to grow up and be a productive member of society. He or she is going to pay taxes, possible raise a family and be part of a community. Instead, we put them in prison, dose them up on drugs and blame them for their actions when I believe they've actually been instigated by the prescription drugs and toxic chemicals in their foods.

The don't need to be punished as mush as they simply need to be nourished. I know this stands at odds with the current "incarcerate everybody" mentality that dominates the culture here in the United States, the land of prisons -- but it's the truth. Why are we the country with the greatest prison population in the world? It might be the same reason we are the nation with the worst health problems in the world. They are connected, you know. People who are unhealthy are unhappy, moody and can display aggressive, violent behavior. Change their diets and you can turn many criminals into normal people. Not all of them, of course, but a large number.

Modern society is addicted to drugs

Someday historians will look back on this era and wonder with great bewilderment how we could poison our children with such toxic chemicals, how we could poison an entire generation with prescription drugs and how we could keep all our senior citizens in a zombie state, dosed up on mind-altering drugs. They will wonder, "How could we do this as a society? Were we insane? Were we completely out of our minds? What was wrong with this society?"

At that time, society will have moved way beyond chemical-based medicine. We will be focused on disease prevention, and we'll have electro-medicine. We'll be using non-local medicine, for example, to help people stay healthy. We'll have outstanding nutrition available at a very reasonable cost in formats people can enjoy taking. Someday, nutrition will be recognized as the number one way to prevent disease and keep people healthy.

Belief in chemicals as a cure-all is just one more sign that we are living in the dark ages of medicine

Today, however, we're living in the Dark Ages of medicine. We're still living in the chemical-based medical society where everybody says that chemicals are the solutions to health problems.

"Does your head hurt? You need a chemical. Blood pressure too high? We have a chemical for that, too. Do you feel nervous speaking in front of groups? We have a chemical for that one. Having trouble with your relationships? Chemical. Got a little bit of joint pain? Yup, there's a chemical for that." Then they'll tell you, just in case, "We have chemicals for stuff that you haven't even experienced yet. We have chemicals that you can take to make sure that you never have pain or heart disease. You should take all these chemicals right now, just in case, and keep taking them for as long as you live."

How's that for a con? The con of pharmaceutical-based medicine is the biggest con ever perpetrated on the American people. That con has effects in our schools, and unfortunately, some of those side effects are fatal.

The silent holocaust of pharmaceutical deaths

Let's look at this in perspective: We're talking about 10 children being killed in this particular incident, and there are a lot of headlines about these 10 children being killed. Certainly, it is a tragedy. None of those children deserved to die, and it didn't have to happen if only we were able to actually take care of our children and feed them right in the first place. But let's compare those 10 deaths to how many Americans have been killed by prescription drugs this year alone. Even the Journal of the American Medical Association says in a peer-reviewed study that prescription drugs cause 100,000 deaths a year in this country.

Ten children die in this school shooting, and it gets a lot of attention. Why? It's violent; people pay attention to violence. Meanwhile, we have 100,000 Americans (and that's a conservative number) dying every year just from prescription drugs side effects, and it gets no attention. Why? It's not violent. These 100,000 people die separately, and they die quietly. They die in homes or in hospitals. There's no fiery crash, there's no late-night footage for the news, there's no big explosion and there's nothing to report to the tabloid papers. It's just 100,000 people dying silently.

Also, more than 16,500 deaths a year are caused by over-the-counter pain medications. Non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) kill more than 16,500 people a year by gastrointestinal bleeding. Then the COX-2 inhibitors, which were supposed to be safer than the NSAIDs, came along, and according to studies by chief drug researcher Dr. David Graham at the FDA, they've caused more than 144,000 heart attacks, more than 40 percent of which have been fatal.

So what are we talking about here? We're talking about drugs killing more Americans than the entire Vietnam War. We're talking about it happening every year -- twice a year, in fact. You want to talk about a war; this is war on the people, and it's being waged by the pharmaceutical industry. They're willing to trade your life for their profits, in my view. They can get away with it because, again, there's no big event. People are dying separately and quietly, and many of the people who are dying were in their old age anyway, right? They figure no one will blame the drug.

We have a disturbingly drug-addicted society here, folks. We've got to get back to health and basic nutrition by raising children with healthy, functioning nervous systems. If we don't do that, no amount of chemistry is going to save us. In fact, these chemicals are already responsible for untold pain, suffering and death in our society.

The solution is not more chemicals. The solution is to change the paradigm and get back to nutrition, healthy foods and disease prevention while getting the poisonous ingredients out of our food supply. If we don't do that, we're going to continue to be a society of violent criminals and degenerates -- a society of people who don't have good cognitive function and who are chemically dependant on a system of medicine that is actually killing them at a rate that makes the Vietnam War look like a Boy Scout skirmish in the woods.

That's the truth about modern medicine today. It's a crime against our own children, and if we are to have any real hope of surviving as a nation for another generation, this practice must be stopped.

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