The Common Ills: Over-medication of veterans and suicide

Friday, October 04, 2013

Over-medication of veterans and suicide

Before dawn, a government van picked up paratrooper Jeffrey Waggoner for the five-hour drive to a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in southern Oregon. His orders: detox from a brutal addiction to painkillers.
He had only the clothes on his back, his watch, an MP3 player and a two-page pain contract the Army made him sign, a promise to get clean.
But instead of keeping Waggoner away from his vice, medical records show the VA hospital in Roseburg kept him so doped up that he could barely stay awake. Then, inexplicably, the VA released him for the weekend with a cocktail of 19 prescription medications, including 12 tablets of highly addictive oxycodone.
Three hours later, Waggoner, 32, was dead of a drug overdose, slumped in a heap in front of his room at the Sleep Inn motel.
“As a parent, you’d want to know how this happened to your child,” said his father, Greg Waggoner. “You send your child to a hospital to get well, not to die.”

That's the opening of Aaron Glantz's latest report for Center for Investigative Reporting. The topic of the VA's over-reliance on prescription pain killers is the topic of a hearing scheduled for next Thursday. This is a sweeping program and it has a huge impact. Until recently, the VA did very little to track suicides. That happened only because Senator Patty Murray relentlessly pursued the VA to the get them to start tracking suicides. If they'd done their job on their own or if they'd immediately responded to Murray's request, there might have been a sense of whether the high rate of veteran suicides was influenced in any way by prescribed drugs. Molly O'Toole (Huffington Post) reports on one veteran's experience:

Promethazine, zolpidem, nortriptyline, morphine, divalproex, metoprolol, prazosin, ibuprofen, diazepam, quetiapine, meperidine, trazodone, mirtazapine, hydromorphone.
For Boone Cutler, this was a "combat cocktail" -– just one month's worth of the medications he was given at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington while being treated for traumatic brain injury after a mortar attack in Sadr City, Iraq, in 2005.
"I'll tell you, at one point in time I was on every drug that killed Anna Nicole Smith, plus some," said Cutler, who was an Army sergeant at the time of the attack.

Meanwhile Keith Rogers (Las Vegas Review-Journal) reports:

Concerned Veterans for America will launch a nationwide bus tour from Las Vegas today to heighten awareness about the Department of Veterans Affairs foot-dragging in its effort to reduce a staggering backlog of 500,000 benefits claims.
The non-profit, nonpartisan organization will also call attention to the nation’s security problems spawned by what the group’s CEO Pete Hegseth described when he arrived Thursday in Las Vegas as the unresolved national debt coupled with a bad policy of automatic budget cuts mandated by the sequester law.
“There are literally billions of dollars unaccounted for in the Pentagon budget. So before we go cutting and slashing combat brigades, let’s find out where the money is and a get a good accounting, especially while we’re drawing down in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Hegseth, an Army veteran of both those wars who currently serves in Minnesota’s National Guard.

Concerned Veterans for America's website is here, their Facebook page is here. And you can follow them on Twitter:

The following community sites -- plus Cindy Sheehan, the Guardian, Antiwar.com, the House Veterans Affairs Committee, Jane Fonda, and Pacifica Evening News updated since yesterday morning: