America’s Mental Illness Epidemic: It Turns Out That the Drugs Are the Problem

[JBeukema]

Tens of millions of innocent, unsuspecting Americans, who are mired deeply in the mental “health” system, have actually been made crazy by the use of or the withdrawal from commonly-prescribed, brain-altering, brain-disabling, indeed brain-damaging psychiatric drugs that have been, for many decades, cavalierly handed out like candy -- often in untested and therefore unapproved combinations of drugs -- to trusting and unaware patients by equally unaware but well-intentioned physicians who have been under the mesmerizing influence of slick and obscenely profitable psychopharmaceutical drug companies, a.k.a. BigPharma.
That is the conclusion of two books by investigative journalist and health science writer Robert Whitaker. His first book, entitled Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill noted that there has been a 600 percent increase (since Thorazine was introduced in the US in the mid-1950s) in the total and permanent disabilities of millions of psychiatric drug-takers. This uniquely First World mental ill health epidemic has resulted in the life-long taxpayer-supported disabilities of rapidly increasing numbers of psychiatric patients who are now unable to be happy, productive, taxpaying members of society. Whitaker has done a powerful, albeit unwelcome job of presenting previously hidden, but very convincing evidence to support his thesis, that it is the drugs and not the diagnosis that is causing the epidemic of mental illness disability. Many open-minded physicians and many aware psychiatric patients are now motivated to be wary of any and all synthetic chemicals that can cross the blood/brain barrier because all of them are capable of altering the brain in ways totally unknown to medical science, especially when the patients are taking the drugs long-term. .
In Whitaker’s second book Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, he goes much further in advancing this sobering reality. He documents the history of the powerful forces behind the relatively new field of psychopharmacology and its major shaper and beneficiary, BigPharma. Psychiatric drugs, whose developers, marketers and salespersons are all in the employ of the giant drug companies, are far more dangerous than the drug and psychiatric industries are willing to admit: These drugs, it turns our, are fully capable of disabling -- often permanently -- body, brain and spirit.

America’s mental illness epidemic: It turns out that the drugs are the problem

 

[waltky]

Drug gang members caught up in big ol' dragnet...

Mexican drug gang suspects rounded up
Feb 24,`11 WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal, state and local authorities across the country are sending an unequivocal message to Mexican drug cartel members in the U.S. and Latin America: If you kill a U.S. agent, there will be repercussions.

"This is personal," Louie Garcia, deputy special agent with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said Thursday as authorities arrested more than 500 people in a nationwide sweep. "We lost an agent, we lost a good agent. And we have to respond."

The massive search for people connected to any Mexican drug cartel working in the United States began Wednesday night as a direct response to the Feb. 15 killing of ICE agent Jaime Zapata in a roadside ambush in Mexico. Fellow ICE agent Victor Avila was wounded in the attack.

As part of the effort coordinated by the Drug Enforcement Administration and ICE, authorities seized at least $10 million in cash and confiscated millions of dollars' worth of illegal drugs. Authorities in Brazil, El Salvador, Panama, Colombia and Mexico conducted similar sweeps in concert with U.S. authorities.

By late Thursday afternoon police and federal agents around the U.S. had seized nearly 300 weapons and more than 16 tons of marijuana along with other drugs. The sweep was expected to continue through Friday.

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Suspect in ICE agent slaying evaded earlier charge
Feb 24,`11 -- A Mexican judge said Thursday that he revoked bail for an alleged drug cartel member just weeks before the man allegedly shot a U.S. immigration agent to death and wounded another.

The judge said he had originally granted the suspect a form of bail in another case because the most serious charges against him did not hold up. Suspect Julian Zapata Espinoza was detained Wednesday by the Mexican army. The army said he confessed to killing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jaime Zapata on a highway near the northern city of San Luis Potosi on Feb. 15, in what he claimed was a case of mistaken identity.

Zapata Espinoza had been arrested in 2009 on charges of illegal weapons possession, organized crime and possession of counterfeit police insignia and using a stolen car. He was released and later jumped bail. District court judge Juan de Dios Monreal explained the bail ruling Thursday, saying he had to dismiss the only two charges under which he could have denied bail for Zapata Espinoza because of a lack of evidence.

Zapata Espinoza was shown in detention photos in 2009 with a group of other suspects and guns and ammunition that had allegedly been seized from them in a raid by the army. The remaining charges were for lesser forms of weapons possession and use of police insignia that were eligible for bail. Since that arrest in 2009, there were indications that Zapata Espinoza was a local leader of the violent Zetas drug cartel, Mexican authorities have said. His bail was revoked Jan. 18. But officials have had a hard time making the charges stick, and even after his detention in the ICE shooting, Zapata Espinoza had not been charged in that case. He was being held under a form of house arrest that prosecutors in Mexico frequently use to gain time to build a case.

Zapata Espinoza - known by the nickname "El Piolin," or Tweety Bird, apparently because of his short stature - allegedly told soldiers after his arrest that a group of gunmen from the Zetas mistook the ICE agents' SUV for one used by a rival gang. "That event occurred because of the characteristics of the vehicle, given that they (the suspects) thought it was being used by members of a rival criminal group," an army spokesman, Col. Ricardo Trevilla, said Wednesday night.

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