America’s New Drug Pushers

Here is some scary information about mind altering drugs and why you want to keep your children off them.

* When 7-year-old Sherrice Iverson was raped and murdered three years ago in the ladies room of a Prime casino, her convicted killer, 18-year-old Jeremy Strohmeyer, was on a prescription for amphetamine stimulant Dexedrine, having recently been diagnosed with ‘attention hyper-activity disorder’ (ADHD).

* After 18-year-old mass-murderer Eric Harris helped perpetrate the Columbine massacres in Littleton, Colo., and killed himself, an autopsy was performed on his body. It revealed that at the time of the school shootings he had been under the influence of the antidepressant Luvox, a cousin of Prozac.

* Thomas Solomon – the 15-year-old who wounded six students the next month in Conyers, Ga. – was taking Ritalin.

* Kip Kinkel, the 14-year-old Springfield, Ore., student who killed his parents, two students and wounded another 22 in a 1998 cafeteria shooting spree, had been prescribed both Ritalin and Prozac.

* In 1997, Sam Manzie, 16, of Jackson Township, N.J., raped and strangled an 11-year-old boy. He was under psychiatric care and being medicated.

* The year before that, Timmy Becton, 10, used his three-year-old niece as a shield and aimed a shotgun at a sheriff’s deputy in Florida. Timmy was being treated with Prozac at the time.

* In September, 1988, 19-year-old James Wilson went on a shooting rampage at a Greenwood elementary school in South Carolina. Since age 14, he had been prescribed psychiatric drugs, including Xanax, Valium, Vistaril, Mellaril, Thorazine, Tofranil, and Halcion.

* In 1986, Rod Mathews, 14, beat a classmate to death with a bat in Canton, Mass. Although extremely bright, Matthews had been on Ritalin since the third grade.

- Source: Nevada Policy Research Institute, “Nevada Journal,” May/June 2000