As Army Ducks for Cover, Document Points to Malaria Drug in Afghan Massacre
Excerpts:
The U.S. military is ignoring documented evidence that links a violence-inducing prescription drug with the worst American war crime in decades — the massacre last year of 16 Afghan civilians by Army Sgt. Robert Bales.
The Army invented the drug, called Lariam or mefloquine, and has consistently avoided reckoning with the consequences, including a string of bizarre murder-suicides stretching back more than a decade.
Officials haven’t said whether Bales took Lariam, but I’ve just obtained a formal report filed by the drug company with the Food and Drug Administration that says he did — the first direct evidence U.S. officials have been aware of the prospect, and for more than a year. (See event/problem narrative below.)
I got the report from Dr. Remington Nevin, a former Army officer who has studied the drug and published peer-reviewed articles about its dangers. In fact, Nevin and former Army psychiatrist Elspeth Cameron Ritchie just published last month in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatric and the Law Online, noting the “potent psychotropic potential” of the drug. “Severe psychiatric side effects due to mefloquine intoxication are well documented,” they wrote, “including anxiety, panic attacks, paranoia, persecutory delusions, dissociative psychosis, and anterograde amnesia. Exposure to the drug has been associated with acts of violence and suicide.”
Nevin told Congress last year it could become “the Agent Orange of our generation.” The alarm apparently fell on deaf ears.
“It remains possible this report was submitted by someone without first-hand knowledge,” Nevin told me about the newly disclosed FDA report. “However, by any reasonable standard, the fact that this report clearly alludes to a case that can only be Bales’ calls for greater transparency by DoD as to whether he was in fact taking the drug.”
Last month, Time magazine wrote about a similar report filed with the Irish drug agency, which refers to the incident as “medically confirmed.” Time called that report a “smoking pillbox.”
The document reproduced here today is specific about the source — it says the information came from a pharmacist. The report does not name Bales, but the killing of 17 [later reduced to 16] Afghanis would seem to rule out anyone else. It is hard to see how someone at the FDA could have failed to bring it to the attention of the military, or how the military in its exhaustive criminal investigation of the case could have failed to learn what drugs it had prescribed to Bales.
Read the Full Document here: http://www.ageofautism.com/2013/07/army-ducks-document-points-to-malaria-drug-afghan-massacre.html
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