10-6-17 Investigators believe the shooter may have been in “physical or mental anguish,” a former FBI official who was briefed on the investigation told NBC News. Another said the shooter displayed "mental health symptoms”.
"[His girlfriend] said he would lie in bed, just moaning and screaming, 'Oh, my God,'" one of the officials recalled. … Paddock was prescribed an anti-anxiety drug in June. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/stephen-paddock-mental-health-screaming-bed-claims-last-vegas-shooting-latest-a7987481.html
…………………………......................................................................................................
10-5-17 The anti-anxiety drug prescribed to Stephen Paddock less than four months before his horrific onslaught in Las Vegas is often consumed by marksmen to calm their nerves and steady their aim.
But that same drug — diazepam — also was prescribed for John Hinckley Jr. before his attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Washington, D.C., attorney Paul Kamenar said Wednesday that he believes diazepam aggravated Hinckley’s mental illness and “actually contributed to his dangerous propensity.”
The Jekyll-and-Hyde reactions to the drug, more commonly known under the trade name Valium, are well understood, according to both Dr. Denis Patterson, a board-certified pain medicine specialist based in Reno, and Dr. Mel Pohl, chief medical officer at the Las Vegas Recovery Center.
Pohl pointed out that all sorts of drugs cause paradoxical reactions. Manufacturers themselves acknowledge that fact through TV ads that warn antidepressants “may cause suicidal thoughts in some patients.”
As the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported exclusively on Tuesday, records from the Nevada Prescription Monitoring Program obtained by the newspaper show that Paddock received a prescription for 50 10-milligram tablets of diazepam on June 21 from Henderson physician Dr. Steven Winkler.
Patterson said when he learned that Paddock had been prescribed diazepam — a sedative-hypnotic drug in a class of drugs known as benzodiazepines — he immediately thought about two things:
“I wondered what psychosocial distress he might have been in and then I also wondered if he made up symptoms for a doctor so he could use the drug to make him more relaxed in the moment for better shooting,” he said, adding that “marksmen regularly use it.”
Henderson physician Dr. James Gabroy, who said he enjoys target shooting in the desert, said Wednesday that is a more plausible scenario.
“That’s exactly what it’s used for by many who shoot,” he said. Winkler, the Henderson physician who prescribed diazepam for Paddock in June and in 2016, has not responded to questions about why he prescribed the medication.
In 1983 Kamenar, the D.C. attorney, sued Hinckley’s doctor, Dr. John Hopper Jr. of Evergreen, Colorado, for negligence and misdiagnosis on behalf of Timothy J. McCarthy, a Secret Service agent who suffered lung and liver damage in the assassination attempt on Reagan.
James Brady, the president’s press secretary, and Thomas Delahanty, a Washington, D.C., police officer, also were parties to the $14 million lawsuit filed in Denver.
“We claimed that the diazepam had the opposite effect of what it was supposed to do,” Kamenar said. “Doctors and psychiatrists are supposed to be aware of that and be sure it’s not causing an aggravation of the problem.”
From all the evidence gathered for the case, Kamenar felt there was no question Hinckley’s mental condition deteriorated while he was taking diazepam.
According to Kamenar, attorneys were able to show that during Hopper’s treatment, Hinckley talked about political assassination — he saw it as a way to impress actress Jodie Foster. But the court ruled Dr. Hopper did not have a duty to warn law enforcement officials about the potential for political assassination because he was unaware of any direct threat and the lawsuit was dismissed.
Kamenar said his experience representing Hinckley now makes him want to investigate whenever he hears violence has been committed by someone using diazepam. “An autopsy may help us get some toxicology answers as to why Paddock did what he did in Las Vegas,” he said.
Officials with the Clark County coroner’s office have not said whether an autopsy has been done of Paddock. (Update: after 4 months the autopsy report still is not publicly available.) The office did not respond to requests from the Review-Journal for comment on Tuesday and Wednesday.
According to Dr. Weldon Havins, a member of the Nevada State Board of Medical Examiners, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), a federal privacy law, bars Dr. Steven Winkler from divulging the reason for his prescription of diazepam for Stephen Paddock.
The law protects the health information for a dead person for 50 years. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the 50-year rule was implemented to balance the privacy interest of an individual’s family with the need by archivists, biographers and historians to access records.
There are exceptions, however. A key one is that under the law, Paddock’s health information could be made public if “the decedent’s personal representative” requested it. That could be an executor, an administrator of the person’s state or someone authorized by law to act on the decedent’s behalf, which could be a family member. https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/the-strip/drug-given-to-paddock-calms-some-provokes-others-experts-say/
…………………………………………………………………………………......................................…
Snorting Valium has become a popular form of abuse. But what does snorting Valium do? When you change the route by which you take Valium, you also alter the concentration and effects of the medication. Snorting Valium takes a shorter time to work in the central nervous system. Instead of diazepam going through the digestive tract to metabolize, it travels through the nasal cavity and crosses the blood-brain barrier shortly after it is snorted. It only take a few minutes to feel the effects of the Valium on the system. Because of the concentration of diazepam in the brain, snorting Valium also affects the potential for adverse side effects. http://prescription-drug.addictionblog.org/what-happens-when-you-snort-valium/
…………………………………………………………………………….
Abuse of drugs—certainly could be a major Paddock weak point. The transnational pharmaceutical companies often are legally immune (do they payoff mainstream media too???)—this is one of America’s most profound weak points. No autopsy report available! Basically a cover-up, like most everything else in Babylon the Great. -r, mt. shasta, ca
..................................................................................................................................
-A view of the music festival site from Room 32-135, Mr. Paddock’s suite, at the Mandalay Bay.
On his first night at Mandalay Bay hotel Mr. Paddock had dinner at a sushi restaurant inside the hotel and returned to the front desk with five suitcases. The next day he took seven more suitcases up to his room with the bellman.
On Sept. 27, Mr. Paddock spent the entire night gambling, not stopping until 7 the next morning. The next day he went to Mesquite and purchased a .308 bolt-action rifle, deposited $14,000 into a Wells Fargo account and transferred $50,000 to an account in the Philippines. He stopped at a gun range before going back to the hotel. He gambled through the night again. On Sept. 30 he brought four more suitcases to his room just before 6 a.m. and two additional one at 3:20 p.m. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/19/us/las-vegas-attack-shooting-paddock.html
No comments:
Post a Comment