Monthly Archives: October 2010

Anna Nicole Smith: two guilty of drugs conspiracy

Boyfriend and psychiatrist convicted of conspiring to give model excessive amounts of prescription drugs—After a two month trial, a Los Angeles court convicted Howard K Stern and Khristine Eroshevich for conspiring to give her excessive amounts of painkillers, antidepressants and other prescription drugs.

Mental health patients ‘locked up in hospitals without legal authority’ — Health regulator says blanket measures introduced in the name of patient security may infringe human rights law

This article highlights the need for CCHR’s Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights to be universally adopted. CCHR is the only organization to have drafted human rights guidelines for the field of mental health, something desperately needed as there are virtually no rights granted to those psychiatry determines, by opinion alone, are “mentally ill.”

Johnny Got His Pills

The military-pharmaceutical complex is making a killing or, more specifically, making a fortune off the folks we’ve asked to do the killing — and off the rest of us. They dope our unruly kids, they dope the young men and women fighting in and returning home from the war, and they dope the rest of us right here at home for being sick of wars overseas and fearful of war on the middle and lower classes and dreading the reckonings to come and being ashamed of our own sad national shadow.

‘Curb dangerous chemical cosh drugs for dementia victims’

In an unprecedented move, a coalition of 45 public and private bodies and charities has pledged to transform the way patients are treated and drive down the use of anti-psychotic drugs. Experts have argued that the ‘chemical cosh’, recommended for short-term use to calm down people who are agitated, has been widely over-prescribed for dementia sufferers in an attempt to keep them quiet, particularly in care homes.

Grassley: Are high prescription rates a sign of fraud?

A Miami doctor wrote nearly 97,000 prescriptions in 18 months for mental health drugs. An Ohio physician wrote more than 100,000 prescriptions in two years. A Texas doctor wrote more than 14,000 prescriptions for the anti-anxiety drug Xanax. These alarmingly high prescriptions numbers for mental health drugs covered by Medicare and Medicaid have prompted Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) to call for an investigation, the Associated Press reports.