PSYCHOACTIVE
DRUGS OFTEN LINKED TO MASS SHOOTINGS
By Martha Rosenberg
We don ’ t know if Robert Crimo III , the confessed attacker in the mass shooting at a Fourth of July parade in a Chicago suburb , was on psychoactive drugs when he acted , but we do know that police were called to his home in 2019 for suicidal behavior and that he was remanded to the psychiatric system .
Mass shooters in the United States tend to be young , obsessive , male loners and many have been prescribed psychoactive drugs . For example , Eric Harris , one of the two shooters at Columbine High School in Columbine , Colorado , in 1999 — which ushered in the current spate of mass shootings — was on the psychotropic drug Luvox . Prescribing information for the antidepressant says , “ Close supervision of patients and , in particular , those at high risk should accompany drug therapy .”
Jeff Weise , who fatally shot his grandfather , his grandfather ’ s girlfriend , and then seven others at the Red Lake Senior High School in Minnesota in 2005 , was on the well-known antidepressant Prozac .
Two years later , Cho Seung-Hui , who perpetrated the Virginia Tech mass shooting , also was found to be on psychoactive antidepressants .
“ We urgently need a national debate about guns . But we also urgently need a national debate about the epidemic of mood-altering drugs being prescribed to young Americans .”
“ We urgently need a national debate about guns . But we also urgently need a national debate about the epidemic of mood-altering drugs being prescribed to young Americans ,” Arianna Huffington wrote in 2007 after the Virginia Tech killer shot 32 people and then himself .
The following year , in 2008 , another university was targeted . Steven Kazmierczak fatally shot seven at Northern Illinois University . He had also been prescribed Prozac , which he had recently stopped taking .
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