by Mike Adams
the Health Ranger
March 13, 2012
from
NaturalNews Website
The recent massacre of 16 civilians in Afghanistan by a rampaging
U.S. military sergeant has something in common with nearly every
school shooting in the USA - something the mainstream media
typically refuses to report:
These shooters frequently have a
history of psychiatric drug "treatment" by psychiatrists.
Psychiatric drugs are now being
routinely used across the U.S. military, where violent suicides have
skyrocketed to levels never before seen in human history.
18 veterans commit suicide every day,
says this
article reprinted on CCHR.
The story reports:
Prior to the Iraq war, American
soldiers in combat zones did not take psychiatric medications,
according to
PBS Frontline documentary The Wounded
Platoon, which aired in May 2010.
But by the time of the 2007 surge
more than 20,000 of our deployed troops were taking
antidepressants and sleeping pills.
These drugs allowed soldiers
with post-traumatic stress disorder to remain in combat when
they otherwise could not.
"What I use medications for is
to treat very specific side effects," said Army psychiatrist
Col. George Brandt. "I don’t want somebody in a helpless
mode in a combat environment. I want to make sure I don’t
have someone with suicidal thoughts where everyone is
armed."
PTSD, TBI
routinely treated with a cocktail of mind-altering drugs
In the military today, soldiers who suffer
TBIs - Traumatic Brain Injuries
- routinely receive treatment with mind-altering psychiatric drugs.
As
reported in WIRED:
In an interview with ABC News on Monday, an unnamed source claimed
that the sergeant suffered a TBI sometime in a past deployment,
either by "hitting his head on the hatch of a vehicle or in a car
accident."
A subsequent story from Reuters reported
that the TBI occurred as recently as 2010. The alleged shooter is
said to have later undergone TBI-specific treatment at Joint Base
Lewis-McChord, before being cleared for duty and then redeployed.
He
also reportedly passed typical behavioral health assessments during
his enlistment.
TBI's are known as the "signature wounds" of soldiers in the Middle
East, reports WIRED, where an astonishing 200,000 soldiers have
already been diagnosed with the condition.
They are routinely treated with
psychiatric drugs that have known side effects of promoting
violence.
In 2010,
WIRED reported:
An untold number of active-duty
troops and recent veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
are coming home with mental health conditions inflicted during
service - and their spouses and children are suffering too. Now,
with solid data slowly emerging from the nearly decade-long
wars, the severity of the crisis is starting to show.
The use of psychiatric medications among 18 to 34-year-olds
(both troops and their spouses) soared by 42 percent between
2005 and 2009, Army Times is reporting.
Many of the drugs prescribed by military doctors, like Paxil and
Zoloft, are also accompanied by warnings about an increased risk
of suicide.
The danger has already caught the military’s eye,
with Army Gen. Peter Ciarelli noting in a recent report that the
Army ought to,
"conduct research to identify appropriate
antidepressant medications that are beneficial to the treatment
of depression and anxiety, but that will not increase risk for
suicidal behavior."
Psychiatric
drug use explodes across the military
NavyTimes reports that psychiatric drug use is skyrocketing among
military personnel, and that violent behavior (suicides) is a
well-known side effect:
Prescriptions for stimulants,
including amphetamines and drugs to treat attention-deficit
disorders, more than doubled.
And claims for anti-psychotics
like
Seroquel and
Abilify nearly doubled from 2005 to 2009 among
beneficiaries ages 18 to 34, the Tricare data show. Seroquel is
often used to treat nightmares and sleeping problems related to
post-traumatic stress disorder.
The rise - and potential dangers - of psychiatric drug use is a
growing concern for many military officials and doctors.
"A lot of neurotransmitters" are involved when troops suffer
from complex combinations of mild traumatic brain injury, PTSD,
depression, anxiety and substance abuse issues, he said.
Cocktails of psychiatric drugs can, in some cases, cause
patients to get worse, doctors say.
Army Gen. Peter Chiarelli on July 29 issued a report about the
Army’s spike in suicides, noting that some psychiatric drugs -
including Paxil and Zoloft, the only two approved for PTSD -
come with warnings about the potential for increased risk for
suicide.
A shockingly
large portion of U.S. military personnel
...are on multiple mind-altering prescriptions:
Narcotics, antidepressants, antipsychotics and more
One Defense Department report reveals that an astonishing 20 percent
of U.S. troops are on psychiatric drugs, and that they are often
handed as much as a 180-day supply of those pills before being
deployed.
Source:
A June 2010 internal report from the
Defense Department’s Pharmacoeconomic Center at Fort Sam Houston
in San Antonio showed that 213,972, or 20 percent of the 1.1
million active-duty troops surveyed, were taking some form of
psychotropic drug: antidepressants, antipsychotics, sedative
hypnotics, or other controlled substances.
Dr. Greg Smith, who runs the Los
Angeles-based Comprehensive Pain Relief Group, said he was
shocked by CENTCOM’s drug policy for deployed troops.
"If I was a commander I'd worry
about what these troops would do," as a result of their
medications, Smith said.
Even the New York Times has covered the
epidemic of psychiatric drugs on U.S. troops.
In an article entitled, "For Some
Troops, Powerful Drug Cocktails Have Deadly Results" (February 12,
2011), the paper reports:
Airman Mena died instead in his
Albuquerque apartment, on July 21, 2009, five months after
leaving the Air Force on a medical discharge.
A toxicologist
found eight prescription medications in his blood, including
three antidepressants, a sedative, a sleeping pill and two
potent painkillers.
Yet his death was no suicide, the medical examiner concluded.
What killed Airman Mena was not an overdose of any one drug, but
the interaction of many. He was 23.
After a decade of treating thousands of wounded troops, the
military’s medical system is awash in prescription drugs - and
the results have sometimes been deadly.
The story goes on to warn about the risk
of suicides (a violent act, obviously) caused by the interaction of
multiple psychiatric drugs:
By some estimates, well over 300,000
troops have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan with
P.T.S.D.,
depression, traumatic brain injury or some combination of those.
The Pentagon has looked to pharmacology to treat those complex
problems, following the lead of civilian medicine. As a result,
psychiatric drugs have been used more widely across the military
than in any previous war.
But those medications, along with narcotic painkillers, are
being increasingly linked to a rising tide of other problems,
among them drug dependency, suicide and fatal accidents -
sometimes from the interaction of the drugs themselves.
An Army
report on suicide released last year documented the problem,
saying one-third of the force was on at least one prescription
medication.
U.S. soldiers
are prescribed a cocktail of mind-altering drugs
-
Antidepressants
-
Sedatives
-
Narcotic painkillers
-
Sleeping pills
-
Anti-psychotics
One-third of the U.S. Army is now taking
at least one medication, reports the New York Times, and many are on
a toxic combination of pharmaceutical cocktails.
This is especially true among those
diagnosed and treated for PTSD, TBI or other forms of "mental
illness."
But rather than offering them real treatment, the recipe for the
U.S. military today is to,
"drug 'em and send 'em back to battle."
So
now we have active-duty troops operating in Afghanistan who are
ticking time bombs of psychiatric medications.
When those time bombs go off, we get suicides, accidents and even
the occasional massacre of innocent civilians.
Safer
alternatives are available
The U.S. military has begun to investigate battlefield acupuncture
and is seeing outstanding results. Watch this extraordinary video
showing battlefield acupuncture working for active duty military
personnel in Afghanistan:
Even
MSNBC has covered the story, reporting:
Now the Air Force, which runs the military's only acupuncture
clinic, is training doctors to take acupuncture to the war zones of
Iraq and Afghanistan.
A pilot program starting in March will prepare
44 Air Force, Navy and Army doctors to use acupuncture as part of
emergency care in combat and in frontline hospitals, not just on
bases back home.
They will learn "battlefield acupuncture," a method Niemtzow
developed in 2001 that's derived from traditional ear acupuncture
but uses the short needles to better fit under combat helmets so
soldiers can continue their missions with the needles inserted to
relieve pain.
The needles are applied to five points on the outer
ear. Niemtzow says most of his patients say their pain decreases
within minutes.
Col. Arnyce Pock, medical director for the Air Force Medical Corps,
said acupuncture comes without the side effects that are common
after taking traditional painkillers.
Acupuncture also quickly
treats pain.
"It allows troops to reduce the number of narcotics they take for
pain, and have a better assessment of any underlying brain injury
they may have," Pock said. "When they're on narcotics, you can't do
that because they're feeling the effects of the drugs."
The U.S. Department of Defense has even promoted the use of
acupuncture as a safe, natural alternative to dangerous (deadly)
narcotics and other drugs.
As reported at Defense.gov:
"The Air Force Acupuncture Center is the first facility of its kind
in DOD ever," Air Force Col. (Dr.) John Baxter said. "It is a
full-time acupuncture facility, and not only is it here to treat
patients, it's here to teach other providers and to do research."
Baxter is director of the Pentagon Flight Medicine Clinic and a
credentialed acupuncturist.
Acupuncture is being used as a treatment
everywhere in the Defense Department,
"but the Air Force led the way
with two formal training programs of 20 physicians each," Baxter
said. "The Navy has one training program with 20 physicians and
efforts are underway to have another tri-service training program."
Source:
http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=62053
What will happen if
we keep drugging our soldiers?
More violence, suicides and massacres
Alternatives are available for many mental health problems
experienced by U.S. troops, but mark my words:
If the U.S.
government continues to subject its troops to the deadly, dangerous
medications pumped out by Big Pharma, we will see more violent
massacres, more suicides, more deaths, and a wave of liver failure
and kidney failure in veterans.
The drugging of troops today creates
a windfall of future profits for
Big Pharma as the side effects of
all these drugs fully kick in.
What these troops don't realize is while they think they're "serving
their country" for a noble cause, in truth they are often
inadvertently serving as Big Pharma's guinea pig profit centers,
where every human body is yet another opportunity for profit as long
as a lifetime of disease and drug dependence can be forced upon
innocents.
And in the wake of all those profits will only be found a
long line of violence, murder and body bags.
Such is the scourge of psychiatric medications on the battlefield.
Additional
sources
|