Press Release
For immediate Release
Contact Information:
Sheila
Matthews
(203) 966-8419
Patricia Weathers
845-677-4118
Parents Join State Legislators in Calling for Investigation into School Shootings and Psychiatric Drug Use
Three
school shootings in the past week have left 11 dead and 29 wounded, prompting
the Bush administration to call for a school violence summit with education and
law enforcement officials to help communities prevent violence and deal with its
aftermath. Yet parents and legislators say that the government has
consistently ignored the correlation between school shooters and psychiatric
drug use and are likely to do so again at the upcoming summit.
Last
year, following the Red Lake Minnesota school shootings and the revelation that
the shooter Jeff Weise was under the influence of the antidepressant Prozac, a
coalition of Tribal leaders and National Foundation of Women Legislators (NFWL)
issued a joint resolution calling on Congress to fully investigate the
correlation between psychiatric drug use and school shooters that had left 29
dead and 62 wounded. Ablechild also requested an investigation at that
time.
The
joint resolution called for such an investigation “to include all autopsies,
toxicology reports, dosages of drugs that school shooters were either taking or
withdrawing from, and testimony from medical experts who have exposed the
dangers of these events”.
To
date Congress has not acted upon this request. Nearly a year later, the Rocky
Mountain News reported that Colorado school shooter Duane Morrison
had an antidepressant in his car. Morrison took several girls
hostage, killing one of them before committing suicide.
The
evidence tying psychiatric drugs to acts of violence continues to mount; the FDA
has warned that antidepressants can cause suicidal ideation, mania, and
psychosis. The manufacturers of one antidepressant, Effexor, warn the drug
can cause homicidal ideation. And earlier this month a study published in the Public
Library of Science-Medicine journal found that the antidepressant Paxil
raises the risk of violence. Though the study focuses specifically on Paxil, the
researchers concluded that antidepressant drugs such as Prozac, Celexa, and
Zoloft most likely pose the same risk. Lead researcher of the study, Dr. David
Healy, director of Cardiff's University's North Wales Department of
Psychological Medicine stated, "We've got good evidence that the drugs can
make people violent and you'd have to reason from that that there may be more
episodes of violence."
Ablechild.org,
a national grassroots parent’s organization, calls on all concerned citizens
to contact their federal representatives, urging them to conduct a full
investigation into the link between the spate of school shootings and possible
psychiatric drug use of the shooters. Furthermore, state
officials must demand full toxicology reports on all three recent school
shooters to determine psychiatric drug usage or withdrawal.
The victim’s families and the public at large deserve no less.