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FDA, VA Approve Drug Despite Its Link To Soldiers’ Deaths
FDA, VA approve drug despite its link to soldiers’ deaths
By Martha Rosenberg | Nieman Watchdog
Seroquel is a widely-prescribed medication, with almost $5 billion in sales last year. But survivors of dead servicemen, torn and angry, question its use as part of a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Sgt. Eric Layne's death was not pretty.
A few months after being prescribed a drug cocktail with the antidepressant Paxil, the mood stabilizer Klonopin and AstraZeneca's controversial antipsychotic drug Seroquel, the Iraq war veteran was "suffering from incontinence, severe depression [and] continuous headaches," according to his widow, Janette Layne, at FDA hearings for new Seroquel approvals last year.
Soon he had tremors. " … [H]is breathing was labored [and] he had developed sleep apnea," said Janette Layne, who served in the National Guard during Operation Iraqi Freedom along with her husband. On the last day of his life, she testified, Eric stayed in the bathroom nearly all night battling acute urinary retention. He died while his family slept.
Sgt. Layne had just returned from a seven-week inpatient program at the VA Medical Center in Cincinnati where he was being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A video shot during that time, played by his wife at the FDA hearings, shows a dangerously sedated figure barely able to talk.
Sgt. Layne was not the first healthy veteran to die after being prescribed medical cocktails including Seroquel for PTSD.
In the last two years, Pfc. Derek Johnson, 22, of Hurricane, West Virginia; Cpl. Andrew White, 23, of Cross Lanes, West Virginia; Cpl. Chad Oligschlaeger, 21, of Roundrock, Texas; Cpl. Nicholas Endicott, 24, of Pecks Mill, West Virginia; and Spc. Ken Jacobs, 21, of Walworth, New York, have all died suddenly while taking Seroquel cocktails. Read more.
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Seems I remember seeing live video coverage of the families testifying in front of our congress about the horrific suicides of the parents children after taking Paxil, and Seroquel. I watched the whole thing, the stories were unbelievable. One family said their docile teenage girl hung herself with a tie while strapped to the top of a closet door. Each story was like this, a side effect of these drugs that make you think horrible thoughts, and to articulate your own youthful death.
These drug companies should be locked up, all of them. There is a long long line for law suits for both these companies for this very same thing; the drug causes violent death to it's users.
If you are depressed, then you should confront your problems, not drown them out in drugs. Depression is NOT a disease; it is a condition of helplessness. What I noticed with people with so called mental illnesses ( a scheme to label and market drugs); is they all have screwed up families, or are asked to go to war to kill innocent women and children. Both are really screwed up situation, and hard to confront. And as all drug dealers do, they take advantage of your vulnerabilities, and ignorance.
So, Just Say No to Drugs (including FDA approved drugs). I hope you sue the pants off them, and put the FDA, and Congress under the jail and throw away the keys. What they know, and what they did; is just over the top. These are our kids, and young men who are loosing their lives due to some ones greed and lack of remorse. So send them a message, or it might be your kid next.
Just wondering what other pills these guys peddle, and what the FDA allowed us to swallow. .