Dakota Beacon

HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr., has, on several occasions, shared his opinion that we need to look farther than the Second Amendment to explain school shootings and other similar mass attacks.  He indicated the strong possibility that prescription psychotropic drugs play a major role.  There seems to be a common factor of prescription drug use in these cases.  Before the widespread use of these drugs, Americans always enjoyed the rights enshrined in the Second Amendment with none of this kind of sensational attack.  Kennedy has a very strong point.  We should support him in this investigation.  Simply voiding the Second Amendment would likely do little to eliminate this violence, but would keep guns exclusively in the hands of the “authorities” (which was the greatest fear of the Founding Fathers) and those who don’t care about the law - like people who don’t care that there is a law already against mass murder.  Abolishing the Second Amendment would render the rest of us, law-abiding citizens and patriots, in the same position as our unhappy British cousins or the people of Iran and other tyrannical dictatorships - helpless and set up to be persecuted as they are simply because a government in power knows how helpless the people are and will remain, regardless of circumstance.  Except, of course, for criminals.  WE CANNOT ALLOW THAT TO HAPPEN IN AMERICA.

Now, recently, we have watched the development of the Lindsay Clancy trial.  Clancy killed her three children by strangulation - as she claims, at the behest of “demons”.  She was aware that she was out of control.  She finally threw herself out of a window and is paralysed as a result.  Clancy’s defense is that the medications she was on had caused psychosis and delusions and she was not able to stop, that the demons were controlling her.  Skeptics have pointed out that toxicology reports indicate that there was not a high enough level of these drugs in her system to produce these effects, and some have said that the toxicology reports indicate also that she may have taken some after she had already killed the three children.  

This mirrors another event which took place close to home, in Thief RIver Falls, Minnesota.   Edwina Stoutenburgh, a mother of several children, attempted to cut the throat of one toddler.  The knife was too dull to accomplish this.  She, too, had called her husband at work and wanted him to come home and stop her.  He called the police and left immediately himself, arriving after the police did.  She was found holding a knife in the front yard.  Her words to her husband were that “they” - the demons - were “back” and directing her to commit murder.  When the police handcuffed her she begged them not to take the cuffs off.  Preceding this event, these same “demons” had ordered her to eat dog feces and the eye of a dead duck, which she did (and said of each that it was “disgusting”).  Then on to the order to kill.  This is eerily similar to the Clancy case with the exception that no one will hear much about it because the children were rescued before the murder could take place.  This woman is charged with lesser crimes.  So far it is unclear whether she had been prescribed any of the same drugs.

In the case of Clancy, however, her list of prescription drugs included Atavan, Seroquel, Valium, Remeron, Trazodone and Lamictal.  It is not really that important how many of these remained in her blood or urine.  The effects of these drugs (all but the Lamictal) are known to produce psychotic episodes long after the drug has cleared the system.  They work to change the brain’s chemistry.  Sometimes the withdrawal can cause more severe reactions than the drug itself.  With this history of prescription drug use, I don’t think I could vote to convict her.  Either way she can’t be allowed to be free in society any longer - perhaps ever again.  Three children are dead.  The world is horrified and the family is grief-stricken.  We have no idea whether this would have happened absent the use of these drugs, but they were a factor and here is the result.  I would suggest they played a major part in both of these horrible events.

America has become over-dependent on use of drugs - we see pain medications misused for their other effects, as in the infamous case of Rush Limbaugh, we see drugs designed to control diabetes (such as Ozempic) used for weight loss - with some devastating looking results, we see drugs used to control mood, to control behavior in school (ADHD drugs).  Jordan Peterson has recounted his battles with the after effects of prescription drugs.  

Several years ago I worked as a secretary in the practice of a group of psychologists.  The attitude in that office was one of a sort of smug superiority - that psychologists were better than psychiatrists in that they actually sought to help the patient work out the roots of his problem and help to resolve it, whereas the psychiatrist would prescribe a pill.  Psychologists do not have certification to prescribe medications (or at least they did not at that time).  Fast forward a few years.  I was hired by the same group of psychologists in a different clinic now, and they had discovered a loophole.  (Perhaps one of them was married to a lawyer - who knows?)  They figured out how they could get on the merry-go-round of creating drug dependency and income for life.  The clinic hired a couple of nurse practitioners.  They were in the process of hiring a child psychologist when I started there, in order to get in on the front end.  This person would see pre-school children.  The psychologist would see a patient by appointment, talk with them for half an hour or so and then refer them to one of these nurses.  The nurse would write a prescription, perhaps even fill it there, and the patient would go out with a little slip of paper or a little white bag.  They would have to see the psychologist again or at least the nurse, to renew the prescription that they thought made them feel better.  I scheduled the psychologists on Outlook in half-hour blocks, but had to schedule the nurses on Excel because they ran through the patients so rapidly.  Several times a week one or another drug rep would appear, ask for one of them and inquire whether they needed any more samples.  It often included a lunch invitation for all of the professionals in the clinic.  

I transcribed long reports and the multitude of drugs that the patients had been using over their lifetimes was incredible.  Often it all began with a horrible, traumatic incident that was handled with a drug.   One wonders whether, had the event been dealt with without a drug, if it might have had a better eventual outcome.   

It became obvious to me that drugs were being substituted for almost everything.  Not only physical pain or illness, but depression, which once we thought of as part of life, sometimes loneliness or uncertainty, or fear or grief.  There might be a need or a valid use for a drug but for everything?  For sadness?  For grief or for fear?  Are we using drugs as a substitute for communication with our children, preferring whatever is the drug du jour for ADHD to keep them quiet?  

A couple of months ago, I had an interesting conversation with a young woman who was raising funds for the homeless.  I opined that perhaps drug use was contributing to this terrible and spreading dilemma.  She agreed.  She said she had been a social worker and had worked with young people trying to get off of drugs.  The common factor was that they had been on ADHD drugs when they were in school, for years after being “diagnosed”.  When they got out of school and the drugs were thus withdrawn, they sought substitutes.  (Presumably this was the way they learned to deal with challenges to this point.)  The cheapest drugs were meth and the like.  Addiction to whatever street drug or combination of drugs was available came next, then the crime and the homelessness.  

Many years ago I read Peter Breggins’ landmark exposé, Talking Back to Prozac (an answer to Peter Kramer’s Listening to Prozac, which explored so-called “cosmetic” uses of that drug to sort of custom-design people’s personalities).  Breggins told of the harmful effects, the catastrophic events caused by this drug.  One recurring effect was that the patient believed he could fly - and would jump off of tall buildings or out of windows to fly.  That should tell us a lot right there.  He warned of the dangerous effects of this one drug on people struggling with mental health issues, the rebound, flashback and withdrawal problems associated with it.  He went on to describe the fatally flawed approval process and its total corruption.  This is how these drugs find their way to market.  

We have seen some terrible abuses in our drug approval and marketing processes.  We see the devastating effects of Ozempic used off-label for weight loss, we see the violence triggered by drugs for mood control, we saw the rush to market of a dangerous and ineffective “vaccine” in 2020, the resulting damage of which we may never know the end.  

America needs to scale back on our “take a pill” response to all of life’s problems.  We need to find the source of the problems, the roots of hyperactivity or depression or whatever it is, try to correct the problem, not mask it with a drug that only temporarily works to mimic normal life.  

The verdict is not in yet for Lindsay Clancy.  Unfortunately, it has taken on a sort of right-left political aspect, with “conservatives” tending to come down on the side of “guilty” and those on the left more or less just excusing her, almost to the extent of making a folk heroine of her and somehow even relating to her, or even blaming others for carrying out the murders.  She has admitted what she did.  She cannot go free regardless.  But if she is convicted as a criminal, should we not assign some blame and accountability to the professionals who prescribe these drugs and left her in such a state?  Because if she has been taking these drugs (and she has), she cannot control their effects.  The doctors know this.  They knew it - or should have known it - when they took out their prescription pad.  

A lot of our domestic woes can be traced to drug use, prescription and otherwise.  The utter failure of our schools, the crime, the economic misery and homelessness, fatal accidents of all kinds, potential loss of our constitutional rights and downright expense.  These drugs cost money, which is why they are being prescribed.  There has been a war on over-the-counter health products such as vitamins and minerals (which we now need because our food no longer has much nutritional value).  Why not redirect this energy to examine and clean up the overuse of prescription drugs?  And should we review and revise our legal approach?  Neil Shah has some interesting history and insights.

Three innocent children are dead.  Someone somewhere must be held accountable.  Perhaps the guilt should be shared.  This was not an event so much as a program and process which led to this.  Dropping the hammer on Clancy while giving a pass to the people who provided her with these drugs would not be demanding true accountability.  As long as it is profitable the drugs will keep flowing and the results will keep tumbling out every so often with these tragic outcomes.