22 February 2014

The agenda for 25 February of the Alameda County Board of Supervisors contains an item which, if passed, will implement California AB 1421, aka ‘Laura’s Law.’  This law, if implemented, would criminalize people with mental illness, empowering local government to require those who experience mental illness to ingest dangerous chemicals as ‘treatment’ for their condition.  While most of the agenda item refers to a voluntary pilot program, one sentence in the proposal acknowledges that the implementation of this law empowers a county to use police to enforce a policy of ‘compliance’ with the law, under threat of incarceration :

The AB 1421 Pilot court processes will require a $50,000 increase in County General Funds, as involuntary services cannot be funded by MHSA or realignment.

The very mention of ‘compliance’ indicates criminalization of those with symptoms of mental illness.  This is an obvious deepening of the police state.

AB 1421 is already law, but was written to be implemented county by county, as each jurisdiction develops a plan (including local funding) to use the power the law delivers to doctors, social workers, and police to conspire to incarcerate any mental health patient, or person with perceived mental illness, who refuses to ingest dangerous chemicals.  The power to ‘diagnose’ and label a person as having mental health issues already lies in the hands of doctors who reap great economic benefit, in the form of kickbacks and gifts from pharmaceutical companies, for applying such labels and prescribing these drugs.  A county (including sheriff agency) employs it’s own doctors, who become empowered, by the implementation of this law, to prescribe psychiatric drugs to people with whom they otherwise have no doctor/patient relationship.

It doesn’t help that so many people are self-prescribing psychotropic drugs, via willing doctors, based on misleading television advertising.

Pharmaceutical companies have notoriously failed to publicize findings from initial drug studies which indicate the dangers of the drugs they sell for profit.  Every chemical ‘treatment’ for mental health conditions has been proven, often long after hundreds of thousands of people have been negatively affected, to cause other health problems.  These include but are not limited to : causing the increase and exacerbation of symptoms of those already diagnosed with mental illness.  Some drugs used to treat mental illness have been found to actually cause mental illness.

Drugs used in the treatment of mental illness come with dire warnings that the drug may cause suicidal or homicidal ideology.  Additional warnings acknowledge that the drugs, while already dangerous to ingest, offer specific, increased, dangers of mental maladjustment when a patient, whether forced, by choice, or due to lack of funds to continue to fill prescriptions, abruptly stops taking a drug.

Many of the recent mass shootings in the news have been reported as being committed by persons under the influence of, or in withdrawal from, these drugs. In the article linked above, the CCHR documents, among other facts, the incidence of mass shootings and other school related acts of violence :

Fact: At least least 31 school shootings and/or school-related acts of violence have been committed by those taking or withdrawing from psychiatric drugs resulting in 162 wounded and 72 killed (in other school shootings, information about their drug use was never made public—neither confirming or refuting if they were under the influence of prescribed drugs).

Another CCHR article point outs other violent acts which have been linked to the use of prescribed psychotropic drugs :

School-related acts of violence aren’t the only cases commonly found to be under the influence of psychiatric drugs. There are 16 other recent acts of senseless violence committed by individuals taking or withdrawing from psychiatric drugs resulting in 61 dead and 32 wounded

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) is a non-profit, non-political, non-religious mental health watchdog. Its mission is ‘to eradicate abuses committed under the guise of mental health and enact patient and consumer protections.’  They have reported extensively on these issues of the dangers of psychiatric medications, including providing a search engine to enable one to discover the effects of specific drugs or drug categories.  On their site is an article published in July 2009 by former pharmaceutical representative K.L. Carlson.  Carlson, author of the compelling expose, Diary of a Legal Drug Dealer – One Drug Rep. Dares to Tell You the Truth, explains the dangers of the use of psychiatric drugs, which can be prescribed by any medical doctor :

These drugs are literally mind-altering.  They can cause people to terminate loving, supportive relationships with family and friends, the very relationships that are extremely important to helping people recover from depression.  The drugs can cause hallucinations, paranoia, and mania.

Dr. Joseph Mercola addresses some of these issues in an article which includes a video interview with medical journalist and Pulitzer Prize nominee Robert Whitaker. As reported by former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine Marcia Angell, Whitaker has this to say regarding the use of psychiatric drugs :

Prior to treatment, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression, and other psychiatric disorders do not suffer from any known “chemical imbalance.” However, once a person is put on a psychiatric medication, which, in one manner or another, throws a wrench into the usual mechanics of a neuronal pathway, his or her brain begins to function …  abnormally.

To add to this problem, almost every county jail has a policy of not only refusing to allow a newly or recently incarcerated person to continue with their chosen drug treatment, but of filing additional charges against people for being in possession of their own, prescribed, medications.

Any policy of forced drugging is anti-American.