MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
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Ron Paul: Fears Cruise Missile Hit on Snowden in Hong Kong
By NCD on Wed, 06/12/2013 - 11:56am |"I'm worried about, somebody in our government might kill him with a cruise missile or a drone missile," said Ron Paul a former Texas congressman who twice ran for the Republican presidential nomination, in an interview Tuesday with Fox Business Network. "I mean, we live in a bad time where American citizens don't even have rights and that they can be killed, but the gentlemen is trying to tell the truth about what's going on."
'
'American citizens don't even have rights and that they can be killed...' What about the right to own guns and thousands of rounds of ammo Ron? Are you so crazy you forgot that one?
And Americans 'can be killed' by psychos with guns, even in First Grade classrooms.
URL:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57588886/ron-paul-fears-nsa-leaker-assassination/
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Comments
I don't agree with him about gun rights but Dr. Paul's one of the few people who actually sees the common denominator of most of these mass murders.
by Orion on Wed, 06/12/2013 - 12:25pm
Is the common denominator psychotherapeutic drugs? Has anyone done a real no drugs with talk therapy versus adequately treated with drug levels versus noncompliance with prescribed therapy to determine if drugs are risk factors?
by rmrd0000 on Wed, 06/12/2013 - 2:41pm
Yup. It's really silly to dismiss the role of psychotropic drugs in these mass murders when they show up more than guns do. You don't have to become a Scientologist or a Christian Scientist to recognize that maybe these drugs do more harm than good.
Peter Breggin M.D. has actually written about a dozen books on the subject, researched it as much as one person could and gone in the trenches on the issue as much as any one person could. His whole career is about reforming psychiatry to focus on all the ways one can be treated on a human level - with messing with the brain only a last resort to go to regarding serious medical conditions.
That also isn't to say that guns aren't an issue. Ron Paul and his son may bring up psych meds because their political ideology/background is to defend the gun industry/lobby. They are right but they're not coming from the right angle at all. A sane society would block anyone in psychiatric treatment from owning a firearm as a rule.
by Orion on Wed, 06/12/2013 - 5:29pm
In medical research single sources are fraught with error. I'm not dismissing the possibility that psychotropic drugs could induce psychosis. It is also possible that being no compliant with drugs is a marker for a higher risk of violence. The only way to really know is to have a prospective study on high risk people with identical diagnoses who are not put on drug therapy and compare them to those on drugs as well as following up on those who were no compliant. The analysis would assess the number of violent episodes in all groups.
i suspect that the study would be too costly since the rate of violence and mass murders would be low overall.
Again I'm not dismissing the negative effects of psychotropic drugs, I'm just pointing out if your career is based on the dangers of psychotropic drugs, then your findings are going to support your belief.The person who gets funding from a drug company to assess a new psychotropic drug is likely going to find some benefit and may not fully explore side effects of the new drug.
this is why double blind studies where the investigator does not know if drug or placebo is being administered is often considered the gold standard.
by rmrd0000 on Wed, 06/12/2013 - 5:37pm
There are studies suggesting that not adhering to psychotropic drug therapy is a risk factor.
by rmrd0000 on Wed, 06/12/2013 - 5:40pm
Thank you; well said, and throwing in the contrarian example is frosting the cake.
(BTW, I believe advocacy for or against medical treatments can be empowering, and is a very good thing, as long as people don't fall whole hog for an advocacy position as THE solution to all that ails. Then they often seem to be actually returning to the same old same old faulty path they were trying to escape. I.E. there actually was good reason to remove some of those kids' tonsils in the 1950's, just not all of them. And if one wants to go into mental health, there's the history of electroshock therapy from good to great evil to significantly-adjusted-can-sometimes-help-hopeless cases.)
by artappraiser on Wed, 06/12/2013 - 6:03pm
by jollyroger on Wed, 06/12/2013 - 6:44pm
One of those rare minds that seems to require alteration from time to time?
Some famously have purportedly done it without chemical assist. Coulda also been undiscovered ergot poisoning, how can we know for sure?
by artappraiser on Wed, 06/12/2013 - 11:35pm
There actually was an article posted about this by a friend called "Psychotherapy vs. Drug Therapy" that a friend of mine posted. I think I'll post that one here after I find it, if that's all right.
Really, what the common denominator is isn't psychotropic drugs per se. Schizophrenics may need Seroquel - I don't know, I'm not schizophrenic.
It's really about SSRIs in particular - the potential for strange behavior has been admitted to me by every doctor I've talked to about these drugs, they mess with the brain in a way more similar to most illegal drugs like cocaine or LSD, they pop up in most of these mass murders and they are advertised on television literally like they are candy. It's not normal for people experiencing clinical depression to try to murder everyone around them - depressed people usually kill or attempt to kill themselves.
by Orion on Thu, 06/13/2013 - 2:17pm
Do you realize that you basically make the "war on drugs" argument with which people like Jolly Roger and many others vehemently disagree? It's not clear whether you know you are doing it, but your arguments always come across that way.
they pop up in most of these mass murders
You have not made the case, to me at least, that they "pop up "in "most" of mass murders in any way, shape or form. Only that they have "popped up" in a few of them. And even in those cases, it hasn't always been clear if the case is that the SSRI's might have been helping mediate their violent tendencies but they went off them because they preferred their "natural" violent and angry selves to the way the SSRI's made them feel. In any case, the evidence I see so far is that the percentage of cases that influenced mass murders could only be so low as to be very negligible as far as solving the problem. If it is 1 in 10 (way more than I see evidence for,) then that leaves 9 mass murders still occurring. And for that you would like to take them away from the maybe 20 or so million people out of 30 million that find relief in using them? Or what?
What I do agree with you about, what is very clear to me from evidence, is that they make plenty of people miserable, as you have quoted one psychiatrist "chewing the furniture." But that does not equate to mass murder. You didn't kill or maim anyone on them, and neither did most of the other millions on them. There is a much stronger case that more restrictive prescription of them could stem the suicide rate than it would affect the mass murder rate. Indeed, it seems easier for me to believe that they have increased the suicide rate while reducing violent attacks on others.
So far, I would be more sympathetic to someone making the argument that they are in part responsible for the concurrent reduction in crime during the period of their popularization than your arguments. It's just a more logical assumption than your assumptions are, there's more evidence than you have. And furthermore I do have many anecdotals that they have helped with reduction in domestic violence.
Lots of people experience bad side effects from lots of drugs. I for one am someone who is very much against taking drugs off the market because of bad side effects for the few. I have very strong libertarian feelings that way. I would rather see more people become informed about realizing how incompetent many of our medical practitioners are, and all the other related issues like the really bad effects of prescription drug marketing and advertising and the general profit motives of the medical industrial complex, and to thereby demand and take more responsibility and freedom for their own treatments. I do not see taking away options of treatments as a solution in any way, shape or form.
When it comes to mental health issues, doing this is, no doubt, a real problem, as some patients are not able to make rational judgments for themselves. And the state of what medicine has to offer for mental illness is pitiful. It's a problem for which I have no solution except advocating for research. But I don't think taking away options is the answer. Trying to inform people about side effects and bad outcomes is. Extrapolating that side effects are so bad as to cause an epidemic of mass murder from bad evidence is just as bad as what some doctors are doing, it seems so far to just be offering disinformation.
by artappraiser on Thu, 06/13/2013 - 3:47pm
I went to a medical marijuana clinic at the height of my personal fall out, when I was still really confused. One of the guys working there, after just hearing that I had taken Klonopin + Effexor for "anxiety," told me to stay away from pot because it would make me "paranoid."
What the War On Drugs did was criminalize drug users and put normal people in jail for using drugs. A sane restriction on prescription drugs that are implicated enough as potentially dangerous isn't going to result in people getting locked up for having a bottle of Klonopin. It will just mean fewer doctors writing scripts.
Drugs are dangerous - that's why we had a War On Drugs in the first place. We should realize and accept that many things in this world are dangerous, even if we think they make our lives better, and take the precautions necessary.
Now that marijuana is legal here in Washington state, there are still limitations. You can't smoke marijuana, say, on the bus or at a children's playground. Marijuana can't be sold to minors.
Similar regulations/precautions should be seen with prescription medication - it should be against the law to give psych meds to 3, 4 and 5 year olds, which I have read multiple reports of. It requires regulation and enforcement to keep that from happening because quite a few people in our society are down with the idea of doped up children.
These aren't medicine - they don't cure or treat a physical ailment. They make you "feel better" and I guess, in the instance of children who are given them when they can't really speak for themselves, make parents feel better. These regulations should have been in place a long time ago - just like we have basic regulations for cars, fireworks, pet ownership, cigarettes, beer, lighters, flying a plane, handling food, buying porn, tattooing, movies, video games, etc.
It may be dueling sides on both issues, but in these last few years you have heard about both very young children being put on mind altering psych meds and being given guns - with the tragic results that both bring. At the core of both is a societal phenomenon of a real lack of respect for children and young adults as human beings that should be protected. People seem horrified by these stories, and Sandy Hook especially, but these episodes would be freak occurences and wouldn't keep happening unless we as a society were making them happen.
That just proves what I'm saying. If the knowledge of what the meds do is so pitiful and we don't know what we're doing, then there should be limitations and these medications should be used only when necessary - not mass marketed as a cure all for all your personal problems.
That is just common sense. Children shouldn't be given antipsychotics and teenagers shouldn't be given antidepressants. That's not making it illegal - that's limiting something that is extremely dangerous to people who may actually need them. This is really just common sense. Maybe then stuff like this wouldn't happen.
by Orion on Fri, 06/14/2013 - 2:41pm
These aren't medicine - they don't cure or treat a physical ailment.
The jury on whether brain chemistry is the source of most mental illness has not ruled yet, but it's pretty close to doing so. If it turns out that it is the case, then ingesting products to change that chemistry certainly would be medicine, whether it's St. John's Wort or SSRI's. Could be faulty medicine, but it would still be medicine.
I am not ashamed of being sympathetic to continuing to try to find chemical answers for sufferers. That doesn't mean I'm sympathetic to the pharmaceutical industrial complex. Not one and the same thing. (They continue to develop drugs in countries with socialized medicine, too.)
Actually, as a proponent of wholistic medicine, I am very strongly prejudiced towards the idea that the brain is just another part of the body, and can be influenced by all the same things as the body. And I believe it is long proven that hormonal imbalances, like diabetes, can cause mental illness. So it would naturally follow that other kinds of imbalances are causing other mental illness. And that when things like talk therapy nad meditation work, they work along the same path as bio-feedback, where the patient learns somehow, in ways we don't understand yet, to alter his/her own chemical /hormonal balance.
teenagers shouldn't be given antidepressants.
Have you checked on that for the number of parents who are pleased with the result of antidepressants for their anoxeric daughter or suicidal son? Or just with those who are driven to post on the internet about it because they are very unhappy with the results?
I know that if I was a parent of a teen with depression problems, I would find your statement offensive and frightening as you find anti-depressant-pushing physicians, that there are people like you out there, who because you have had a bad experience and collected anecdotals about similar bad experiences, want to see my options limited.
It's a good thing to want to inform people about bad experiences with medicines and to give them the knowledge to make their own judgments. It's another thing to call for further restrictions on their use.
by artappraiser on Fri, 06/14/2013 - 3:55pm
P.S. One reason I really don't get your jihad to try to get everyone off SSRI's just because you and others had bad reactions to them is because I personally had a very bad reaction to tricyclics the one time they were given to me long ago. I had a lot of undiagnosed serious physical symptoms (turned out later to be a massive auto-immune attack mimicking M.S.) and was running from doctor to doctor and gazillion tests protocol. One neurologist thought that my hysterics over my situation were adding to the problems and gave me imipramine. Though it's supposed to take quite some time to start working, within 24 hours I was having reactions like nystagmus, severe visual disturbances, incredible agitation, rapid heartbeat and all manner of muscle twitching and a black tongue.
Despite that happening to me, I would NEVER consider thinking the drug shouldn't be tried by others! It's just one reaction, most likely dependent on MY very-screwed up personal chemistry at the time. As a matter of fact, any smart doctor would welcome the info. of such a reaction as just another clue to eventual diagnosis and proper treatment! (the kind I luckily found later did.) I reacted in a manner unlike many others because my body chemistry was screwed up.
That is the way anti-depressants should be properly used: trial and error, because they don't know the mechanisms involved. I really don't understand your need to project your results on the rest of the anti-depressant-taking world.
Furthermore, it is irrational that when you see a story like this one to grab onto it as proof of the badness of anti-depressants and totally ignore the part about taking "Spice" and being depressed in the first place. It does not bode well for your ability to be a smart partner in your own medical care that you cannot immediately see the complexity of the possibilities in that case and just chalk the cause up to anti-depressants.
by artappraiser on Fri, 06/14/2013 - 4:28pm
P.S. re: they mess with the brain in a way more similar to most illegal drugs like cocaine or LSD
Not that I buy that they are that similar in effect, but your argument here works against your own theses! Where was the increase of "mass murder" when those drugs were at the height of their popularity? The associated crime waves come from them being illegal and having a profitable black market! Same as with heroin, opium, and marijuana...and always worse crime with those that are addictive as addicts will do anything, pay anything for their fix.
Most places where there is a societal problem from legal inexpensive mind-altering drugs that are illegal and expensive elsewhere, it is always something that is nearly the opposite of violence.
by artappraiser on Thu, 06/13/2013 - 3:39pm
I think it doesn't really require research to believe that cocaine, LSD, etc. all resulted in strange behavior. Violence in particular was affiliated with crack cocaine.
Here's a pretty good explanation of what I mean in implicating cocaine:
by Orion on Thu, 06/13/2013 - 5:27pm
Oh, yeah. We're gonna launch a cruise missile or drone into Chinese territory to kill a guy for revenge!?! Why bother when there are simpler ways like 1) we could likely get China to trade him back to us or better still take him to the mainland; if not, then 2) stick him in the leg with a poisoned umbrella; or.....
by EmmaZahn on Wed, 06/12/2013 - 4:18pm
And that is why he chose Hong Kong rather than, say Yemen. Because both 1) and 2) are still better than the drone strike.
by erica20 on Wed, 06/12/2013 - 4:24pm
LOL
Snowden checked into a large Hong Kong hotel under his own name because he was worried about CIA agents 15 minutes away in the US embassy taking his life.
The Paul's do love the idea of killing people in San Francisco Starbuck's with drones and a guy in Hong Kong with cruise missiles.
So far I'm wondering why there was no system alert for Tsarnaev while time and effort focused on Occupy Boston and how much briefing Congress got on the programs.
by rmrd0000 on Wed, 06/12/2013 - 4:27pm
As I said elsewhere, in order to catch Tsarnaeav the FBI would have needed a classic low tech Rolodex index card file of 'guys living in Boston that the Russians told us were terror linked and whom we interviewed in the last two years'. And a picture of the same at the scene of the bombing, which they were given. Rolodex budget: $12.95
All they had was an NSA supercomputer with a gazillion terabytes of phone calls and emails and lots of overpaid guys like Snowden. Budget: $32 billion(?). And you expect miracles?
by NCD on Wed, 06/12/2013 - 4:49pm
I think it was a decade ago that a new super weather computer was fired up and promptly missed a large hurricane because the programming was faulty.
by rmrd0000 on Wed, 06/12/2013 - 5:22pm