US Soldiers Drugged up and Demented; Psychotropics-induced brain damage and Mitigation
Mort Zuckerman
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Subject: US Soldiers Drugged up and Demented; Psychotropics-induced
brain damage and Mitigation
Date: May 20, 2009 9:30 AM
There ya go. (MSM ARTICLE BELOW)
Now all of psychiatry is liable in every instance
of a medicated person going off the deep end,
cuz now it is a known and an inarguable and
hurting the soldiers...
And duh CT DCF is now liable, too, and can no
longer incarcerate the forced-brain-damaged children
who commit crimes during and after their captivity
and forced-drugging by duh DCF and Yale (who use
these DCF-kidnapped children for the psychotropics
experiments they conduct in cahoots with BigPharma)
because clearly now it is *known* that the crimes
committed by a drug-brain-damaged person are
technically and scientifically *MITIGATED.*
http://www.actionlyme.org/DCF_GRADUATARDS_SPEAK.htm
"The drugs made me dumber."
"I can't read any more."
"I was overwhelmed by the loss of my family after being
kidnapped by DCF"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uf9P7EbMtno&feature=related
KMDickson
http://www.actionlyme.org/BRAINDAMAGE.htm
==============================================================
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30748260/
U.S. military: Heavily armed and medicated
Prescription pill dependency among American troops is on the rise
By Melody Petersen
Mens Health
updated 8:30 a.m. ET, Tues., May 19, 2009
Marine Corporal Michael Cataldi woke as he heard the truck rumble
past.
He opened his eyes, but saw nothing. It was the middle of the night,
and he was facedown in the sands of western Iraq. His loaded M16 was
pinned beneath him.
Cataldi had no idea how he'd gotten to where he now lay, some 200
meters from the dilapidated building where his buddies slept. But he
suspected what had caused this nightmare: His Klonopin prescription
had run out.
His ordeal was not all that remarkable for a person on that anti-
anxiety medication. In the lengthy labeling that accompanies each
prescription, Klonopin users are warned against abruptly stopping the
medicine, since doing so can cause psychosis, hallucinations, and
other symptoms. What makes Cataldi's story extraordinary is that he
was a U. S. Marine at war, and that the drug's adverse effects
endangered lives — his own, his fellow Marines', and the lives of any
civilians unfortunate enough to cross his path.
"It put everyone within rifle distance at risk," he says.
In deploying an all-volunteer army to fight two ongoing wars, in Iraq
and Afghanistan, the Pentagon has increasingly relied on prescription
drugs to keep its warriors on the front lines. In recent years, the
number of military prescriptions for antidepressants, sleeping pills,
and painkillers has risen as soldiers come home with battered bodies
and troubled minds. And many of those service members are then sent
back to war theaters in distant lands with bottles of medication to
fortify them.
According to data from a U. S. Army mental-health survey released last
year, about 12 percent of soldiers in Iraq and 15 percent of those in
Afghanistan reported taking antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications,
or sleeping pills. Prescriptions for painkillers have also
skyrocketed. Data from the Department of Defense last fall showed that
as of September 2007, prescriptions for narcotics for active-duty
troops had risen to almost 50,000 a month, compared with about 33,000
a month in October 2003, not long after the Iraq war began.
In other words, thousands of American fighters armed with the latest
killing technology are taking prescription drugs that the Federal
Aviation Administration considers too dangerous for commercial pilots.
Military officials say they believe many medications can be safely
used on the battlefield. They say they have policies to ensure that
drugs they consider inappropriate for soldiers on the front lines are
rarely used. And they say they are not using the drugs in order to
send unstable warriors back to war.
Yet the experience of soldiers and Marines like Cataldi show the
dangers of drugging our warriors. It also worries some physicians and
veterans' advocates. "There are risks in putting people back to battle
with medicines in their bodies," says psychiatrist Judith Broder, M.
D., founder of the Soldiers Project, a group that helps service
members suffering from mental illness.
Prescription drugs can help patients, Dr. Broder says, but they can
also cause drowsiness and impair judgment. Those side effects can be
dealt with by patients who are at home, she says, but they can put
active-duty soldiers in great danger. She worries that some soldiers
are being medicated and then sent back to fight before they're ready.
"The military is under great pressure to have enough people ready for
combat," she says. "I don't think they're as cautious as they would be
if they weren't under this kind of pressure."
Brought more than memories back
When Cataldi talks about what happened to him in Iraq, he begins with
an in incident that took place on a cold January night in 2005, when
he and five other Marines received a radio call informing them that a
helicopter had disappeared. The men roared across the desert of
western Iraq and found what was left of the chopper. Flames roared
from the pile of metal. Cataldi, 20, was ordered to do a body count.
The pilot's body was still on fire, so he shoveled dirt on it to douse
the acrid flames. He picked up a man's left boot in order to find the
dog tag every Marine keeps there. A foot fell to the ground. "People
were missing heads," Cataldi remembers. "They were wearing the same
uniform I was wearing."
The final death toll from that crash of a CH-53E Super Stallion was 30
Marines and one sailor.
For days, Cataldi couldn't escape the odor of burning flesh. "I had
the smell all over my equipment," he says. "I couldn't get it off ."
When he returned to his stateside base at Twentynine Palms,
California, he knew he'd brought more than memories back from Iraq. He
would cry for no reason. He flew into fits of rage. One night he woke
up with his hands around the throat of his wife, Monica, choking her.
"It scared the crap out of me," he says.
He went to see a psychiatrist on base. "He said, 'Here's some
medication,' " Cataldi recalls. The prescribed drugs were Klonopin,
for anxiety; Zoloft, for depression; and Ambien, to help him sleep.
Later, other military doctors added narcotic painkillers for the
excruciating pain in his leg, which he'd injured during a training
exercise. He was also self-medicating with heavy doses of alcohol.
Those prescriptions didn't stop the Marine Corps from sending Cataldi
back to Iraq. In 2006, he returned to the same part of the Iraqi
desert to do the same job: performing maintenance on armored personnel
carriers known as LAVs. He also took his turn driving the 14-ton
tanklike vehicles, one of which was armed with a 25 mm cannon and two
machine guns and loaded with more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition.
Marine Major Carl B. Redding says he can't talk about the medical
history of any Marine because of privacy laws. He says the Corps has
procedures to ensure that service members taking medications for
psychiatric conditions are deployed only if their symptoms are in
remission. Those Marines, he says, must be able to meet the demands of
a mission.
But it's difficult to square those regulations with Cataldi's
experience. His medications came with written warnings about the
dangers of driving and operating heavy machinery. The labels don't
lie.
One night, Cataldi took his pills after his commander told him he was
done for the day. Five minutes later, however, plans changed, and he
was told to drive the LAV. He asked the Marine sitting behind him to
help keep him awake. "I said, 'Kick the back of my seat every 5
minutes,' and that's what he did."
Cataldi says he managed on the medications — until his Klonopin ran
out. The medical officer told him there was no Klonopin anywhere in
Iraq. So the officer gave him a drug called Seroquel. That's when
Cataldi says he started to become "loopy."
"I'd go to pick up a wrench and come back with a hammer," he says. "I
wasn't able to do my job. I wasn't able to fight."
Soldiers on medication
Soldiers have doped up in order to sustain combat since ancient times.
Often their chosen drug was alcohol. And Iraq isn't the first place U.
S. military doctors have prescribed medications to troops on the
front. During the Vietnam war, military psychiatrists spoke
enthusiastically about some newly psychiatric medicines, including
Thorazine, an anti-psychotic, and Valium, for anxiety. According to an
army textbook, doctors frequently prescribed those drugs to soldiers
with psychiatric symptoms. Anxiety-ridden soldiers with upset bowels
were sometimes given the antidiarrheal Compazine, a potent
tranquilizer.
But the use of those drugs in Vietnam became controversial. Critics
said it was dangerous to give soldiers medications that slowed their
reflexes, a side effect that could raise their risk of being injured,
captured, or killed. That risk was real. In a report supported by the
U. S. Navy 14 years after the United States withdrew from Vietnam,
researchers looked at the records of all Marines wounded there between
1965 and 1972. Marines who'd been hospitalized for psychiatric reasons
before being sent back to battle were more likely to have been injured
in combat than those who hadn't been hospitalized.
Critics of medication use in Vietnam also said that a soldier
traumatized by battle may not be coherent enough to give his consent
to take the drugs in the first place. Plus, a soldier would risk court-
martial if he refused to follow orders, they said, making it unlikely
he could make a reasoned decision about taking the medications.
After the war, the practice of liberally giving psychiatric drugs to
warriors fell out of favor. In War Psychiatry, a 1995 military medical
textbook, a U. S. Air Force flight surgeon warned about the use of
psychiatric drugs, saying they should be used sparingly.
"Sending a person back to combat duty still under the influence of
psychoactive drugs may be dangerous," he wrote. "Even in peacetime,
people in the many combat-support positions... would not be allowed to
take such medications and continue to work in their sensitive,
demanding jobs."
Colonel Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, M. D., M. P. H., a psychiatrist and
the medical director of the strategic communication directorate in the
Office of the Army Surgeon General, acknowledges that writing more
prescriptions for frontline troops was a change in direction for the
Pentagon. "Twenty years ago," she says, "we weren't deploying soldiers
on medications."
Today it's not uncommon for a soldier to arrive in Iraq while taking a
host of prescription drugs. The Pentagon explained its new practice in
late 2006, stating that there are "few medications that are inherently
disqualifying for deployment."
According to Colonel Ritchie, military officials have concluded that
many medicines introduced since the Vietnam War can be used safely on
the front lines. Military physicians consider antidepressants and
sleeping pills to be especially helpful, she says. Doctors have also
found that small doses of Seroquel, an anti-psychotic, can help treat
nightmares, she says, even though the drug is not approved for that
use.
Two months after the new drug policy was issued, President Bush
ordered more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq in an attempt to
quell the violence. This surge in American military presence in Iraq
increased the pressure on Pentagon officials to quickly redeploy
soldiers and Marines just back from war.
Surveys of behavioral-health professionals offer hints about what has
happened as soldiers are medicated and then sent back to fight. In
last year's surveys, carried out by teams sent to Iraq and Afghanistan
by the Army Surgeon General, a staff member reported that there had
been "quite a few [evacuations for] psychotic breakdowns."
"Many of these soldiers are sent to Afghanistan," the staff member
said, "despite a doctor saying they shouldn't go or leaders knowing
they shouldn't deploy."
To meet its needs, the army has also begun accepting more people with
existing medical or psychiatric conditions. A recent study by U. S.
Army medical staff found that 10 percent of new recruits reported a
history of psychiatric treatment.
In an article in the journal Military Medicine, Jeffrey Hill, M. D.,
and his colleagues wrote about soldiers who had made suicidal or
homicidal threats at a base in Tikrit, Iraq. Of 425 soldiers evaluated
for psychiatric treatment, they reported, about 30 percent had
considered killing themselves in the previous week, and 16 percent had
thought about killing a superior or someone else who was not the
enemy.
Each of these soldiers poses a dilemma for physicians, they wrote,
because of his or her duty "to conserve the fighting strength" — the
motto of the U. S. Army Medical Department. Doctors must try to avoid
sending these soldiers home, but they must also recognize the dangers
of keeping them in Iraq, where weapons are everywhere.
‘He was a good kid’
When Travis Virgadamo arrived from his army unit in Iraq for a visit
with his family in July 2007, he hesitated to tell his grandmother,
Katie O'Brien, what he had seen. "'I've seen little children killed,'"
she remembers him saying. "'You can't imagine what it's like, Grandma.
You just can't.'"
Virgadamo, shy and quiet as a boy, had grown up wanting to be a
soldier. "It was his dream," O'Brien says. "He was a good kid. He
would do anything for you."
Soon after entering the army, however, Virgadamo began to have
problems. In boot camp he became angry and suicidal, prompting an army
doctor to write him a prescription for Prozac, his grandmother says.
Not long after that, he was sent to Iraq. One day as men in his unit
were cleaning weapons, the commander sent Virgadamo for some gun oil,
O'Brien says. When he didn't return, they went to look for him. They
found him with a gun in his mouth.
Virgadamo was sent home to Pahrump, Nevada, to be with his family for
10 days. Then he would be returned to Iraq. O'Brien learned that he
was sent to a class meant to help him, and that he had been given a
new medication instead of Prozac. The day he supposedly completed his
class, O'Brien says, his commander gave him his gun back.
That night he used it to kill himself.
"They all knew he was in a very serious situation," O'Brien says. "He
was a danger to the other soldiers as well as to himself."
She is furious that the army gave him Prozac. She points out that the
labeling of Prozac, Zoloft, and similar antidepressants state that the
drugs have been shown to increase suicidal behavior in people age 24
and younger — a group that includes large numbers of American
soldiers.
Virgadamo was 19 when he died.
"It was so unnecessary," she says. "We can't bring him back."
The U. S. Army's suicide rate is now at an all-time high. Colonel
Ritchie says officials are studying the reasons for the increase,
including the possible role of medications. Soldiers taking
antidepressants have killed themselves, she says, but so far there is
no evidence that the risk is higher for those taking the drugs.
Instead, the army has found, soldiers who committed suicide often had
personal problems, such as troubled marriages or financial
difficulties. Repeated deployments can strain family relationships.
"The army has been at war for a long time," Colonel Ritchie says, "and
everyone is kind of tired."
‘No condition to leave’
At age 26, with a new wife and child, Michael R. De Vlieger never
seemed to have enough money. He had resorted to selling his blood
plasma for extra cash when he noticed the recruiting station next door
to the donation center. That was in November 2004. Fifteen months
later he was on the ground in northern Iraq, a gunner with the 101st
Airborne.
Not long after he landed in Iraq, roadside bombs blew apart two
Humvees from his platoon, killing nine soldiers, including men he knew
well.
The next month, as he manned a Humvee on patrol passing through a
crowded market, grenade-throwing insurgents jumped from behind the
fruit stands. One antitank grenade landed under the vehicle. The blast
didn't pierce its metal, but the force drove De Vlieger's knee through
the door.
He was later evacuated by helicopter and returned to Fort Campbell, in
Kentucky, to recuperate. But his personality had changed. He began to
drink heavily, and flew into rages. One day, he attacked his wife's
dog.
"I had lost so many friends and went through a near-death experience,"
he says. "I wasn't who I was when I left."
He was updating his will and preparing to return to Iraq when he broke
down. His wife, Christine, found him awake in the middle of the night,
rocking while babbling incoherently. Frightened, Christine called his
squad leader, who took him to the base emergency room. Doctors then
sent him to a nearby private psychiatric hospital, where he stayed for
16 days, receiving medications to calm his panic and treat his blood
pressure and depression. The doctors released him with four
prescriptions.
A noncommissioned officer in charge of De Vlieger's unit's stateside
operations told him that day that he had to leave immediately for
Iraq. Less than 18 hours after being released from the hospital, De
Vlieger was on a plane heading for the Middle East. "I was in no
condition to leave," he says. "I'm an infantryman. If I'm screwed up
in my head, it could cost my life or the lives of the men with me."
Pentagon policy requires that service members with psychiatric
conditions be stable for at least 3 months before they can be
deployed. Colonel Ritchie says she can't comment specifically on any
soldier's medical history, but agrees that sending someone to Iraq
just hours after leaving a psychiatric hospital would violate the
policy.
DeVlieger says the medications altered his thinking — a side effect he
didn't want to deal with at war. He threw the pills away.
"I had a weapon, entire magazines filled with rounds. It's not like it
would have been difficult for me to commit suicide," he says. "I don't
believe it was safe."
Military physicians can be swayed by the aggressive promotional
efforts of the pharmaceutical industry just like civilian doctors
often are. The military has rules that limit the handouts doctors can
take from drug companies. A doctor can go to a dinner paid for by a
drug company, but the meal's value can't be more than $20, and the
value of all gifts received from a company over the course of a year
can't exceed $50.
The drug companies have devised ways of working around those limits.
When thousands of military and federal health-care professionals met
in November for the annual meeting of the Association of Military
Surgeons of the United States (AMSUS), more than 80 pharmaceutical
companies and other health-care firms were on hand. The companies
helped pay for that San Antonio event in exchange for the opportunity
to set up booths in the convention hall, where sales reps pressed
doctors to prescribe their products or to use their medical equipment
and devices.
The 6-day meeting included a celebration; 15 military and federal
doctors and other health professionals received awards that included
cash prizes provided by various drug companies.
Colonel Steven Mirick, the association's deputy executive director,
says the companies didn't choose the recipients of the awards or
influence the meeting's agenda or the educational courses offered. He
also said that AMSUS had followed the strict government rules
concerning the funding of those awards. Doctors would have to pay a
much higher registration fee, he says, if the companies were not
allowed to contribute.
Aggressive corporate promotion is one reason behind the army's fast-
rising use of narcotic painkillers. Manufacturers of narcotics like
OxyContin and Actiq have spent millions in recent years to convince
doctors that the drugs aren't as addictive or as dangerous as most
people believe. Before such corporate marketing campaigns, many
doctors hesitated to prescribe narcotics unless a patient was
suffering from a serious, pain-inflicting condition — terminal cancer,
for instance. Drugmakers expanded the market by encouraging docs to
prescribe narcotics to people suffering from more moderate pain, and
by downplaying the drugs' addictive potential.
These same manufacturers fund organizations like the American Pain
Society. The society's noble goal of eliminating pain has made it the
perfect conduit for drug marketing.
Military doctors agreed with the American Pain Society that pain
treatment should be more accessible. In 1999, the Department of
Defense and the Veterans Health Administration began a campaign called
"Pain as the Fifth Vital Sign," a motto that had been created and
trademarked by the society. Doctors treating active-duty service
members and vets were urged to test and treat pain just as they would
blood pressure and body temperature.
The Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs also
issued a guideline in 2003 that directed doctors on how to prescribe
narcotic painkillers for chronic pain. Chronic pain can be related to
conditions ranging from arthritis to the phantom-limb pain experienced
by amputees. "Repeated exposure to opioids in the context of pain
treatment only rarely causes addiction," the guideline noted.
That statement is controversial. In a study at Brigham and Women's
Hospital, in Boston, 22 percent of patients taking narcotics for long-
term treatment showed signs of abusing the drugs. The army has plenty
of firsthand evidence of how addictive the painkillers can be. At Fort
Leonard Wood, in Missouri, officials charged more than a dozen
soldiers with illegally using and distributing narcotics, including
drugs they'd reported picking up at the base's pharmacy for little or
no cost. Many of the soldiers had suffered injuries in Iraq or in
training but had later begun abusing the painkillers reportedly
prescribed by army doctors.
One problem is that injured soldiers in pain are often also suffering
from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which makes them vulnerable
to abusing alcohol or drugs. A soldier taking a narcotic can start
using it to escape more than his pain.
Cataldi, who's now out of active duty, says that when he returned from
his first tour of Iraq, both he and a friend were taking painkillers
for injuries. They couldn't seem to get enough of the drugs, he says.
"We'd find pills on the floor," he says, "and just take them."
Narcotics can make patients dizzy and unable to function. Their labels
warn about performing "potentially hazardous tasks."
Staff Sergeant Jack Auble took Oxy-Contin, Percocet, and Vicodin for a
serious back injury as he worked in Camp Stryker, in Baghdad. Prior to
that tour, he had been in the process of being medically discharged
from the army after 20 years of service because of severe osteoporosis
in his spine. Then he was sent to Iraq.
Auble's job in Baghdad was to monitor a computer that showed in real
time what was happening on the battlefield. But the side effects of
the drugs made his job impossible, he says. He frequently lost track
of what people said to him and the positions of troops in the field.
At times, he says, he dozed off in his chair.
"I could not do the job," Auble says. "My judgment was clouded all the
time."
After 3 months in Baghdad, Auble's pain worsened. The army evacuated
him to a hospital outside Iraq. At 44, he is now retired with a
permanent disability, and walks with a cane.
According to Colonel Ritchie, painkillers can help soldiers do their
jobs by reducing pain, which allows them to concentrate. "But these
medications are lethal in overdose and can't be used carelessly," she
says, adding that if side effects interfere with a soldier's ability
to perform, he or she is moved to another job or sent back to a home
base.
"It doesn't do the soldier or the army any good," she says, "if he
can't do his mission."
The army is adding safeguards to reduce the chance that soldiers will
become addicted to painkillers, she notes. And the guideline informing
doctors that the drugs rarely cause addiction is being rewritten.
Cataldi now works as a mechanic in Riverside, in Southern California.
He lives with his wife, 2-year-old daughter, and 10-year-old stepson
in an apartment at the foot of a mountain. On his living-room wall
hang framed photos of his grandfather and uncles dressed in their USMC
uniforms.
Doctors at the V. A. still aren't sure how to help Cataldi. His
current diagnoses include PTSD and traumatic brain injury that might
have been caused by several concussions he suffered in training and in
Iraq. He also still feels intense pain in his leg. He shows a visitor
snapshots taken at the funerals of some of his buddies. He goes to the
kitchen, bringing back four bottles of medications, including
Klonopin, the drug he blames for creating a needless ordeal in Iraq.
He fears he'll be on Klonopin for the rest of his life. When he tries
to stop taking it, he spaces out and isolates himself.
"If I had never been put on medications and just had counseling, I'd
be a lot better off ," he says.
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