Guns, Drugs, and Money

      With plenty of big issues being discussed in the news, Senate, water cooler, and dinner table I thought it would be a great chance for me to contribute what I think on the subject via Daywalking.  I haven't posted in awhile and this will certainly be more involved than a Facebook post.  For now though I will only write out the abridged version, with a longer version to follow, hopefully. 

      When I was in 7th grade I wrote a hit list as a joke.  For some reason a few of my friends and I thought school shootings were intriguing.  I still think they are - tragic - absolutely, but interesting from a psychological standpoint.  Anyway I got caught and was suspended for two weeks and had to see a counselor and do some other things including study the Columbine Massacre.  Now I'm about to compromise all journalistic integrity I attempt to hold myself to and make this a quick argument, broken up, you can take it or leave it.  Keep in mind I'm a self-professed conspiracy theorist, and that I don't really want this to offend anyone or change any lives.  All I want is for people to be more literate consumers.  Let's begin.

      First, I don't believe for one second that the government or Obama wants to "take our guns".  It's asinine to believe they do.  However, some kinds of guns are pretty deadly and maybe shouldn't be in the hands of certain people.  Heart disease has killed at least 23 times more people in the U.S. than can be attributed to homicide.  Homicide includes guns, knives, asphyxiation, and all the other stuff you see people dying of on Law and Order.

     It's more of a personal rant unrelated to this article, but why are we even giving two breaths to gun control when in 2005, something mostly preventable (by not being fat) killed 652,091 people in the U.S. and homicide only claimed 19,544?  The reason surely isn't suicide, which claimed less than twice as many as homicide at 32,637.  What I'm trying to say is, why aren't we as a country getting violently animated over very preventable deaths?  If every overweight American all 111,236,850 (35.7% of adults) of them did insanity once a week and drank one less Coke per month, the number would probably drop off by about the number of yearly homicides.

**(that last statement was not based on fact, just a guess.  If you're skeptical, that would only be ~1.7%.  By the way the percentage of waking hours in a week (12 * 7 = 84) given up for a 1.5 hour insanity workout is 1.7%, and a person who drinks one can (12oz) of Coke every day (3 gallons = 373 ounces per month) giving up one can per month is cutting their consumption by ~ 3.4%, or 1.7*2%.... coincidence? I THINK NOT!)

      If you know me you probably know the one thing I really don't like discussing is suicide, but today I will.  As you have probably heard an 11-year old girl in London, OH committed suicide this week because of "bullying".  I don't want to make light of bullying, but her parents are saying it was because she wore thick glasses to school and had ADHD and the other kids made fun of her.  Now most of us were 11 once (s/o to all my 10 year old readers!) and if you were 5'4", 150lbs with ginger curly hair, no pigment so speak of outside of epic freckles everywhere with glasses, braces and these like me, you probably caught your fair share of grief.

      Again, I'm not trying to downplay bullying, in fact the only thing that makes me fear reproduction is the idea of having a little person I love more than anything in the world come home crying because someone called them a name or made them feel otherwise inferior.  However, for my argument I must notice one thing from this rather short narrative.  The girl was diagnosed with ADHD.  Diagnosis usually means prescription, and in a small rural community like London, OH, the combination of ADHD and apparent depression because of bullying at school probably meant a litany of drugs for this poor girl.  I hate to speculate, but I'm guessing based on what I've seen on the internet (take with grain of salt) that this girl was taking Prozac or Zoloft.

     Let's return to the Columbine shootings.  Eric Harris (Columbine Shooter) was taking Luvox, his parents released his tox screen after autopsy and he had it in his sytem.  Luvox is just a stronger form of Prozac or Zoloft.  Dylan Klebold's screens came up negative for any type of prescription medication and his parents never released their son's medical history.  There are however plenty of other instances of students on Zoloft and other drugs killing their classmates.  Only 10% of school shootings aren't linked to anti-depressant medications.  Violence isn't a new thing, but turning guns against teachers and classmates is strictly a 20th century invention.  

     The first school shooting in the U.S. that didn't appear to be motivated by any prior violence was a principal shooting two teachers in February of 1960.  In 1966 Charles Whitman got climbed into the bell tower at Texas University and famously shot at innocents walking around the campus.  He was taking Dextroamphetamine, an early drug for treating ADHD.  These types of drugs were introduced in the 1950s.  Cho Seung-Hui the Virginia Tech shooter was proscribed Prozac.  James Holmes the Colorado Batman midnight premiere was overdosed on prescription drugs.  Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, was on Fanapt, an anti-psychotic prescription medication unapproved by the FDA. 

     Now I want to make this blog worth your time.  Some of you may not tune in to sports radio every day like I do, so I will give you a short brief.  Currently in the world of football many people, including the president (yes, that president) are talking about the dangers of football in light of several suicides by professional football players committing suicide due to chronic and sustained injuries to the head and the lasting effects of those injuries.  Sports media has moved through blaming increased size of players, increased aggressiveness, bad coaching at the entry level for players, helmets that do not adequately protect the head.  

     Similarly to how people guns, bad parents, bullying and everything else possible, we now have people condemning contact sports because they're causing suicides later in life.  Depression is real, alcoholism is real, and the fact that adults are mixing these things with prescriptions drugs is real and scary.  I have no idea how you can see a depressed drug addicted alcoholic kill himself and think "wow, that must have been the concussions he had 15 years ago". 

     In the U.S. in 2011, 212,681,364 people were prescribed with anti-depressant drugs with 57,883,832 coming from Zoloft and Prozac alone.  Obviously not all of those people are committing school shootings or taking automatic weapons to movie theaters, so I don't want to say these drugs are totally evil.  But something is.  I don't buy prescription drugs, luckily, but I found a site that said brand named Prozac was $2.40 per capsule which means if all 57 million people took one pill a day, the upper bound on the amount of money spent is $50,706,236,832 or 50.7 BILLION dollars.  That's an upper bound of course, but even if the generic brand costs half that, we're still talking about BILLIONS of dollars for prescription drugs companies.  Would you like to know why people are constantly turning a blind eye to the obvious correlation between prescription anti-depressants?  Advertisers have believed for a long time that the American public is stupid, impatient, immature, and hungry for answers.  In our world there is a drug for every disease.  No longer is the cure for depression counseling and increased attention, it's drugs, expensive, potentially suicide inducing drugs. Wake. Up. 

     Now, prescription drugs can help.  Again, millions of people are not committing suicide or mass murder.  I'm not saying they ever will.  If you're depressed and the medicine is helping, you're doing great and I hope one day you can stop taking those drugs and be yourself again.  But look, football is not the issue, bullying is not the issue, and gun ownership is not the answer.  Those are all things that we may want to give a little more focus on making safe, but they're not the reason people shoot themselves.  Let's temper our responses and not take the easy way out anymore.  Americans play the blame game exceptionally well and when we threaten others' rights to insure the safety of a few it's an atrocity on an order much greater than any school shooting ever could be.  There is no way to guarantee complete safety anyway, but if there is an obvious link between something we have the option of ingesting and violence against others, it seems like there should be a little more control over that, not the methods of that violence.

Drugs Induce Violence

Another Source