Trumps prepares for 'jacob's ladder' experience

A conservative “dark money” group that received funding from the pharmaceutical industry’s largest trade organization pushed President Donald Trump to use unproven antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 and make it more widely available.



Last month, the conservative nonprofit group Job Creators Network (run by Home Despot co-founder & the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America) collaborated with health care deregulaters 'Physicians for Reform'  to launch an online petition, a series of Facebook ads and a mass text message campaign urging Trump to make hydroxychloroquine available to treat patients battling COVID-19.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/health/canadian-veterans-set-to-sue-government-over-anti-malarial-drug-effects-1.4350096?cache=/5-things-to-know-for-tuesday-october-22-2019-1.4649608?autoPlay=true wrote: Canadian soldiers who took a military-issued anti-malarial drug held a town hall in Ottawa, Ont., on Sunday to discuss both their concerns that the drug may have caused incapacitating mental health side-effects and a class-action lawsuit they are set to launch.



Nearly 1,000 Canadian veterans have joined the lawsuit, which will sue the federal government, claiming that the anti-malarial medication mefloquine has left them suffering from depression, night terrors, aggressive behaviour and suicide.

Philip Brooks, a retired air force captain who joined to lawsuit, was on the drug for two weeks before his mission to the Congo was cancelled.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/apr/10/experience-anti-malaria-drugs-made-me-psychotic wrote: I was buzzing. I felt that everything I’d ever learned had come together in my mind, and the beauty of my ideas sent shivers down my back and legs. After less than a week, I felt I knew God, and that I was his second son. I began writing a new religion, a mixture of Christianity, Islam and my own reflections. I had never been so excited.

One night I was sitting in a chair, just staring at a wall, when the wall started to move. The colours were changing, patterns were forming in the shape of faces, and the wall shifted in circles. A grasshopper flew over and sat on the arm of my chair. I looked at it and thought, we are the same, but in different bodies. That night I shaved my entire body – everything except my head – because I thought it would make me more like a Ghanaian.



The next day I stopped taking my allergy medication and wearing my contact lenses, because I knew I was chosen and could make miracles happen. But later that day I was suddenly short of breath, very hot and then shivery, and I knew I was sick. I went to talk to a doctor in the hospital in Tamale, who told me to stop taking Lariam – he’d also had a bad experience.

One widely supported reading of the film Jacob's Ladder (spoiler!) is that all of the post-war action is in Jake's mind, the product of a psychotic state induced by the experimental drug the platoon were given in Vietnam.

Mefloquine (sold as Lariam) was designed by US Army chemists, ostensibly as a quinine analogue - but the drug's origins incite conspiracy theories, especially since the unit concerned has a strong reputation in neuropsychiatry.

FDA wrote: common adverse effects such as pruritus, nausea and headache, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine can predispose patients to life-threatening arrhythmias, an effect that may be enhanced by concomitant use of azithromycin. Other uncommon but serious potential harms include hypoglycemia, neuropsychiatric effects, idiosyncratic hypersensitivity reactions and drug–drug interactions, with genetic variability playing an important role in each of these.

Present day Fact or Silly 1980s Cyberpunk Fiction?