Editorial Note: This is the transcript of a program broadcast as The Lariam Legacy on BBC Radio on March 31 2015. The narrator is Victoria Derbyshire. The featured drug is the anti-microbial Lariam, mefloquine. Mefloquine is closely related to the Fluoroquinolone’s Levaquin and Cipro. See previous RxISK posts on Lariam History, Lariam Hell and Flox-Tox. Atabrine […]
Editorial Note: This post is by Julie Wood, the central figure behind SSRI Stories in its current incarnation. SSRI Stories has collected and posted 47 stories about pilots flying and crashing while on antidepressants. The majority are airplanes but several of the crashes involve helicopters. With the current focus on the possible contribution of psychoactive drugs […]
Editorial Note: This post is by Leonie Fennel. Ireland is currently in the midst of an unprecedented suicide/homicide epidemic. Parents are uncharacteristically killing their children; husbands are killing their wives; brothers are killing their brothers; mothers are killing themselves and their babies, all at an alarming rate. Dr Michael Curtis, Deputy State Pathologist, recently said […]
Editorial Note: On October 16, there is an FDA hearing about Chantix and violence which is widely expected to feature an effort by Pfizer to roll back the warnings on the drug. One of the fascinating things about the Chantix story has been to see perfectly normal friends who use it to stop smoking become […]
Editorial Note: We desperately need you to undertake some jury duty – we need you to explore why we react so strangely when it comes to changes on behavior linked to prescription drugs? In the last two posts Doctor Faces Marriage-Buster and Homicide of a Husband, there were two scenarios where drugs were involved and […]
Editorial Note: This post starts with Michelle Millikan’s report to FDA of the night she killed her husband. The event Several days after my 6th injection of Lupron Depot, in some kind of an impossible-to-understand and difficult-to-explain ‘fugue state’, I killed my husband with a gunshot to the head while he was sleeping. I have […]
Editorial Note: This is the second part of a Lariam Odyssey by Dr Sam Ramsay Smith. The first part ran last week – Lariam Hell. Like most good stories this one involves expediency, hegemony, immorality, greed and even scientific bias, blindness and dishonesty all in the quest for power and money at the national and […]
Editorial Note: This post and the following one on the strange story of the Birth of Lariam come from Dr Sam Ramsay-Smith who has some questions he wants answered. In October, ‘The Independent’ printed the news that the US Armed Forces had banned the use of the anti-malarial drug mefloquine, otherwise known as Lariam. To […]
The news from Washington this week (September 17 – See Scientific American) of another shooting where the shooter has been on psychotropic medication – this time trazodone – raises once again questions about the interaction between violence and medication. The data points absolutely convincingly to the fact that the drugs can and do cause violence. Some […]
This was first posted on Leonie Fennell’s blog. Antidepressants, irrational behaviour and “out of the blue” suicides – raising awareness among UK police officers In 2009 my son, who had never been depressed in his life, went to see a doctor over insomnia caused by temporary work-related stress. He was prescribed Citalopram, and within days […]
Anonymous There is a war going on over truth in drug marketing. There have been many victims of drugs that made it to market with deadly and damaging side effects. Increasingly, drug companies have sought to expand their markets by targeting children and young people. Many young people have died and many more have been […]
I myself had been on and off a long series of antidepressants, but never had really dramatic withdrawal symptoms until I stopped the SNRI inhibitor Cymbalta. It started when I tried to step down from 120 mg per day, back to the standard 60 mg dose. From simply feeling depressed and tired, I shifted into full […]