The curious medicine chest of killer John F Shick.

[WoodsyHowl]

Last March, a man named John Shick, a man with well known mental health issues who was familiar to psychiatric workers at University of Pittsburgh and to similar health care professionals in at least one other state, walked into the U Pitt Medical Center with guns and shot up staff in the hall, killing one.

Fast responding UPMC security shot him dead.

John F Shick, a Columbia University graduate, had been banned from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh months earlier for harassing others. He had been psychologically evaluated at least once in Pittsburgh thereafter. But he had also been evaluated years before in Oregon after a run-in with police there. In the days before his shooting rampage, he had threatened UPMC staff with a baseball bat.

It had long since been the opinion of authorities in at least two states that he should be committed to a psychiatric facility.

He wasn't.

After his shooting rampage at UPMC, police found 43 prescription medications in his apartment, ranging from pain pills to treatment for erectile dysfunction, irritable bowel syndrome and intestinal worms.

If these meds were obtained by Shick legally, that means that as many as up to 43 doctors prescribed them, and these prescriptions supposedly included:

anti-migraines
anti-convulsants
for chronic kidney disease
for impotence
for cholesterol reduction
anti-hypertensives
sedatives
hypnotics
for hypothyroid
for cancer treatment
for intestinal worms
anti-anxiety
for ulcers
for chronic pancreatitis
for gall bladder disorders
narcotic pain suppressors
for irritable bowel syndrome
for cardiovascular disease

Up to 2011, Shick lived for three years in Oregon, where he had a run-in with the law resulting in a mental health evaluation in 2009.

Apparently thereafter, he traveled all the way to New Mexico to purchase the guns he used in his deadly UPMC rampage.

Immediately after publication by local media of the list of drugs found in his apartment, disinterested but shocked lay-persons such as myself asked themselves the obvious question: How many of these drugs was Shick on from the time of his troubles with Oregon authorities until he was shot dead?

Shick's forensics are not to be found, as far as I can see, but it's the position of the medical community in Pittsburgh that he wasn't taking any of his medications, not even the prescription for intestinal worms.

QUIZ:

1 Based on the above information, would you say Shick "slipped through the cracks" of mental health professionals all the way across the US?
a. yes
b no
c I'm too dumb to vote.

2 Regarding the thousands of miles Shick traveled to buy weapons, do you think he would have sought to obtain guns regardless of whether they were legal or banned?
a yes
b no
c I love Obama as much as I love Harry Reid.

3 Do you think Shick would have succeeded in obtaining firearms, regardless of whether they were legal or illegal?
a yes
b no
c How far away from New Mexico is Mexico and the FBI's huge cache of weapons there?

0.1 miles, but please, don't answer a question with a question ...

4 What fact in the above information would you say most strongly hints at a solution to the problem Shick presented?
a that he had a pharmacy worth of medications and should have been taking all of them as prescribed
b that some in the medical community in two states were at least somewhat aware that he was a bomb waiting to go off, and the important question was how big would be the explosion.
c I'm going to buy the complete Teletubbies collection and invite all my friends over for a movie marathon.

5 Seriously, pal, knock it off. Where in the above information is the strongest suggestion of the only practical and cost-effective action to be taken against Shick and others like him?
a legally owned guns carried by responsible citizens clearly can and do stop these madmen and their atrocities.
b outlaw people I don't like.
c Obama gave me an iPod for my vote last November instead of a boo-boo Blackberry. How cool is that?

[HolyCrapItsFunk]

Love how this story never made big news.

How long until pharmaceutical companies and mental health standards are addresses properly?

It's horrible the gov dumps money in their current agenda and not into something that may make a difference.

[Sandcut]

Hell, half of those drugs were necessary to make up for the side effects of the other half. I think the bigger crime here was the lack of communication between the medical community that allowed the guy to be jacked up on so many meds in the first place.

And yes, the guy had serious problems that were never addressed and that, too, is sad.

[Philbert]

Hell, half of those drugs were necessary to make up for the side effects of the other half. I think the bigger crime here was the lack of communication between the medical community that allowed the guy to be jacked up on so many meds in the first place.

How do we know he didn't buy them on the Internet?

[Curmudgeon]

Welcome to America, here is our health system...

[wallyone]

I can see the new expanded background checks will include a list of all your meds. and then when ever your doctor writes you a new proscription he must report it.

[WoodsyHowl]

I can see the new expanded background checks will include a list of all your meds. and then when ever your doctor writes you a new proscription he must report it.

But the burden and cost certainly wouldn't be an erosion of the 2nd Amendment, eh. Just keep loading stuff up until the suspension breaks.

[WoodsyHowl]

The Shick tragedy brings to mind what I think of as the Gates Caveat or Ultimate Caveat -- a blanket disclaimer to deny any product liability, a practice that seems to have begun in the consumer software market back in the 1990s and became adopted by the pharmaceutical industry.

The Ultimate Caveat (UC) holds that by purchasing a new software product, the buyer agrees that the manufacturer shall remain blameless for any and all problems that might result to your computer, other software or to loss of any or all important data.

In the case of pharmaceuticals, the UC has to be stuffed into the pill box, so the legal details are in such fine print that you need a microscope to read it all in order to make it fit onto the paper in the box. All they really need to say is: "We aren't responsible for anything." in big bold letters that any senior citizen with cataracts can read without glasses. But that sounds too thoughtless, unsophisticated, uneducated and -- well -- just plain lazy.

The UC is now fashionable everywhere. You can find the most bizarre legal disclaimers on a lot of things you buy, but with a few notable exceptions -- food, automobiles and guns. They are all conspicuously and sensationally liable.

Food doesn't really have to have anything wrong with it to be held accountable -- it just has to sound yucky. In the case of automobiles, manufacturers recall their products for issues that sometimes sound more like problems with driver coordination than anything actually wrong with the cars. And gun makers? Don't need to preach to the choir here. Why, they're so villainous as to be grounds for abolishing the Constitution in order to protect you from them.

One might go so far as to say that all of this is consistent with the possibility that politicians favor and cultivate laws that are compatable with nurturing some future stoned out, totally surveilled existence -- a self-fulfilling, mutually promoting techno-existence, I suppose one they would define.

[ungawa]

Don't worry. Once Obama is a one-stop-shop clearing house for your medical records you will never have to worry about something like this happening again. There is no way he'll force you to take that many medications.

[WoodsyHowl]

Don't plan on ever taking any such meds, myself. However, I suppose some would like to suggest that there is prescription medicine to treat "troublesome thoughts" that lead to making an honest observation such as I just made.