Alcohol completely fails to explain how someone commits a mass murder, then returns to base, waits several hours, then commits another mass murder.

Alcohol is a great facilitator of what a person really wants to do. It is an explanation, not an excuse. The removal of inhibitions makes it possible for a man to assault a woman, although he would never do so when sober. That is why so many spousal abuse cases involve alcohol.

That is also why alcohol is not an excuse or a defense for an assault or murder, or at least should not be an acceptable defense.

The other instances of violence associated with Sgt. Bales might also be alcohol-associated or, since he has served for a decade in war zones, Lariam might play a role in those as well.

Definitely blows the insanity defense. It was carefully calculated, executed and re-executed.
What would you call this? 2 Premeditations?

I watched the Democracy Now video. To be accurate, the video did not depict soldiers saying the prescription policy is not followed in the field. It depicted Mark Benjamin saying that soldiers have said that. Some of Benjamin's prior work on autism and vaccines makes me skeptical of his reporting on medical issues, particularly ones that involve pharmaceuticals and mental health issues. I'd like independent corroboration of his statements.

Medics handing individual anti-malarial pills out to soldiers is not consistent with my understanding of how medications are currently administered. I could easily be wrong on this, and SueDB is almost certainly a better source of information, but there are lots of deployed soldiers who are regularly taking prescription medications, including soldiers at remote FOBs. They take their medications the way you and I would - they get a bottle of pills from the pharmacy along with instructions on when to take them. Malarial meds might be handled differently since everyone is going to be on them, but that seems unlikely.

I can see the logistical issues as a reason that doctors would prescribe mefloquine more often than they should, and that might have accounted for the high prescription rate prior to the 2009 directive to use mefloquine only when necessary. (And possibly still - see what I said earlier about supervision of doctors.) I have a hard time seeing unit medics handing out mefloquine regardless of the prescription orders. A medic that gets caught doing that is going to get into a shitload of trouble.

Bales was almost certainly not taking Lariam prior to this deployment. IIRC, all his prior deployments were to Iraq. I don't think anti-malaria drugs were considered necessary for Iraq tours.

You don't drink to excess.

Please don't fall into the ez trap of blaming the drugs rather than the person who pulled the trigger. You don't know since you don't have his medical records. Not to be a show spoiler, but...it isn't always about a drug.

I certainly have. I know many other people who drink. Hundreds of millions of people in the world drink, many to excess. Some of them commit impulse crimes they might not otherwise have committed. The vast majority do not commit multiple acts of mass murder.

Alcohol is not sufficient to explain these acts.

I beg to differ. Closet Alcoholics can go for a long time before losing their cookies.

I am unaware that alcohol improves one's ability to carry out complex plans.

Are you seriously saying that alcohol, alone, is "sufficient" to explain mass murders? There's a lot more at work here.

The other thing is you don't know what they were drinking. ETOH is banned in country. That leaves smuggled or home made. There are quite a number of GIs that know how to make a still. Now making a Safe still (no fusel oil or other various aldehydes). GI's can make coffee and or alcohol out of about anything. You would be surprised at the material that will ferment.

No I am serious saying that your assumption about alcohol is all wet. The things that gets these guys is the old "who is the enemy trick". They all "look the same" act the same, and shoot you in the back the same. Kids with bombs. How can you deal with such RECKLESS hatred.
This is a force trained to a fine edge to Kill, not police or keep order -

Did you do a tour of Vietnam or the Mid East??? When you do, then please come back and chat.

Have you even followed what happened in this story? Just wondering, because you don't seem to be familiar with the details, which do NOT involve mistaken identity.

That's basically the argument I'm trying to make, yes.

I don't think SueDB is saying that this was mistaken identity, or anything close. It's a more brutal reality.

When anyone could be the enemy, how long does it take before everyone is the enemy? When everyone is the enemy, but they won't let you kill all of the enemy, how far do your inhibitions and judgement need to be lowered before taking matters into your own hands turns into a good idea?

We can blame mefloquine. We can blame alcohol. We can blame the army for keeping Bales after the drunk driving incident or the violence against the girlfriend. We can blame the army for deploying him again after a brain injury. We can blame Bales for being a murderous asshole. Some or all of those are almost certainly true to an extent. But the common factor is war.

We've been sending the same people to fight the same war for a decade now. We've been sending them back over and over and over again. And it's a war that's mostly being fought out of. The public eye. How many of you can tell me - without looking it up - how many Americans died in Afghanistan last year? How many of you can get within 10% of the figure? Shit, how many of you can tell me how many Americans died in Afghanistan last week?

I've been at a post deployment party where a sergeant-major was drunk and crying under the table. I've seen attack pilots singing Fiddler's Green with tears running down their cheeks, not because its a sad song but because of who they weren't singing it with. I was at a pre-deployment party with that same sergeant-major and same pilots eight months later.

I've lost count of the number of marriages I've seen disintegrate because people have had to choose between their families and their comrades. I've seen the excruciating mix of despair, delight, and guilt that has accompanied a decision that someone is not medically fit for the next deployment.

Lest I be accused of insensitivity, I'm not talking about the impact of the war on the Afghan people right now not because I don't care about it but because it's a different issue.

Look, I'm not in the military. Never have been. Flunked the physical. But I stopped thinking of myself as a civilian a long fucking time ago. That's not a good thing, but I can't help it. My experiences have become so disconnected from the understanding of most Americans that it's hard to consider myself to be part of that broad civilian group when military matters are concerned. I can't even watch MASH the way I used to. Now I spend half the show wondering how Mildred Pottter, Peg Hunnycut, and Radar's Uncle Ed are doing.

This shit frustrates me so much at this point that I don't know if I want to scream or cry. Bales goes fucking berserk and kills innocent women and children. So last week, this week, next week, and then probably not again until either the trial or the next sexy, shampoo-selling incident, everyone is acutely invested in their concerns about the mental health of the deployed force. People are suddenly concerned about the conduct of "The Army" in prescribing anti-malaria drugs. Pop quiz, concerned people: how many doctors usually deploy with a combat brigade, and what are their jobs?

Here's another pop quiz: what mental health resources are available to the spouses of deployed troops? How does the rate of anxiety, depression, and other mental illness in that population compare with the American public as a whole? What resources are available to children who have just seen classmate lose a parent?

There are lots of magnetic ribbons stuck to cars declaring the love the American public has for the military, and the support they offer. But one of the local bases loses its library next week, one of the arts and crafts centers is closing, and the gyms are having their hours cut. Morale, Welfare, and Recreation programs - which I consider to be a mental health resource - took yet another budget hit.

Nobody gave a shit last week about most of what I just said. I doubt anyone will next week, and I've got no confidence that everyone does now. But Bales committed mass murder, so everyone wants to find the simple reason that his brain broke.

Oh, Mike.

Thank you, Mike, for saying things that needed to be said. And for saying them so eloquently.

No, there was no mistaken identity (only possibly in his mind). From his standpoint they are ALL the enemy. You don't send soldiers to rebuild and pacify a country. They are for killing and destroying.

My Hoody ate my post.

It would be essential to have independent corroboration of Mark Benjamin's report of his conversations with soldiers. He has been reporting on Lariam for quite a while, but I was unaware of his reporting on vaccines and autism. I would also be skeptical. However, I have found Democracy Now to have more credibility than, say, Daily Kos or Russia Today.

Soldiers have been saying for many years that Lariam is dangerous. I can provide some evidence for that, later.

I do think that it is in the military's interest that a connection to Lariam be denied. This could become another Agent Orange fiasco.

A bit more information on what the medical profession, Roche, and soldiers knew about Lariam. No audio of the interviews, however.

60 Minutes February 11, 2009 The Dark Side Of Lariam by David Kohn

http://www.LariamInfo.org has much information from Lariam victims. I am sure that some of it is misinformation.

Lariam would be a big problem for the military and the drug makers if a connection were proven, but it could never be as big as the Agent Orange disaster which not only affected the military and American civilians that were in the contaminated areas (and their offspring) but also the millions of people who continued to live in those areas where the water and food supply was contaminated. To a large extent, they still are. The US government refused to do the studies that were necessary to prove the connection and still do not admit a connection. It is as much to protect the chemical companies from liability as anything. The government and VA eventually started covering certain cancers and conditions without admitting a connection. One of the reasons that the embargo stayed on VN so long and relations were not restored was the issue of reparations. The US would not allow the issue to be brought up. If we had been paying reparations for just the damage done by chemical contamination, the Treasury would have been depleted and then some.

The drug makers will lobby to keep studies on Lariam from being carried out or else do the kind of fake studies that were done on herbicides used in VN.

I agree that Agent Orange was a much larger assault upon humanity than Lariam is. It was the attempt to cover-up and deny to which I was comparing Lariam.

The FDA does not have authority over all clinical trials; nor does Hoffman-LaRoche. The medical literature, in fact, reports a number of clinical studies.

As reported by 60 Minutes, Hoffman-LaRoche is well aware of the psychiatric side effects: (emphasis mine)

Hoffman-LaRoche settled a wrongful death suit with the Perrys.

The claims that suicidal and murderous soldiers had not taken Lariam are based upon prescription records, not upon observation of what was being done in the field or, of course, upon the testimony of the suicides. I firmly believe that military physicians have no idea of the extent to which Lariam is being used in the field against their orders. One bit of information that would be helpful is a compilation of the quantity of all DoD purchases of Lariam for the Afghanistan war compared to a compilation of the quantity of all prescriptions of Lariam for use in Afghanistan. I suspect such information will never be forthcoming.

Mark Benjamin has been reporting on Lariam for a considerable period of time. He and Dan Olmsted were working on the story as early as 2002. Dan Olmsted is well known in the autism-as-vaccine-injury community, and Benjamin worked with him on stories related to that issue as well. I'd be skeptical of his reporting on this issue based on that alone, even if his account did not run counter to my understanding of how the Army handles prescriptions.

That said...

I don't think there is any doubt at all that mefloquine is dangerous. The question is how dangerous, particularly when compared with the risks of malaria.

The Army's policies have preferred doxycycline to mefloquine for troops in Afghanistan since at least 2004. The Army ordered use cut still further in 2009. The Army is a big institution, there are lots of people involved, and it's almost certain that there are cases where that policy has been violated. But purchase data alone would seem to indicate that there is not the sort of ubiquitous use of the drug that Benjamin seems to be implying exists. From a November, 2011 article in USA Today:



The military is simply not buying enough mefloquine to be using it the way Benjamin seems to be saying it's used. The 2008 prescription rate for the Army is consistent with mefloquine being prescribed to less than a third of the soldiers deploying to Afghanistan that year; given the buildup of troops in Afghanistan, the prescription rate for 2010 is under 5%. The financial expenditures reflect that.

This is not a drug that is being passed out like candy. As the understanding of the risks has increased, use has fallen off.

I firmly believe that you are operating from a state of profound ignorance regarding the military's medical practices. I was almost feeling guilty about my rant from yesterday; now, I'll repeat the question that I asked:

How many physicians does a combat brigade normally bring with them when they deploy, and what are their jobs? If you can't answer that, then you frankly have no basis for having any sort of firm belief about what military physicians do or don't know about what's going on in the field, because you don't have a fucking clue about how military health care is structured in the field.

As far as the information on prescriptions and purchases goes, I had already found the USA Today article that had information you suspected would never be forthcoming before you posted this - I was working on my own post when you hit submit. It wasn't hard to find - I googled "lariam military purchases". Found it on the first page.

What's going on here? This isn't like you - you're not usually a sloppy or biased researcher.

Incidentally, you have no need at all to feel guilty about that rant. I agreed with every word of it.

The only point I've made or tried to make on this thread is that the nature of the crime makes it clear that it was premeditated and carried out in an organized fashion. That makes blaming it on alcohol or a drug reaction, by itself, completely ridiculous.

I didn't mean to seem like I was ignoring your post.

I also don't think Tolland actually intended to say that he thought alcohol or some drug reaction was the sole cause of this incident either. My original response to the "sufficient" remark was more of a semantic quibble than anything.