Pentagon Stays Silent on Whether Suspect in Afghan Massacre Took Controversial Anti-Malaria Drug

Robert Bales Charged: Military Scrambles To Limit Malaria Drug Just After Afghanistan Massacre

In 2004 in the United Press International, this reporter and reporter Dan Olmsted chronicled use of the drug by six elite Army Special Forces soldiers who took mefloquine then committed suicide. (Suicide is relatively infrequent among Special Forces soldiers).

"You're ready to take that plunge into hurting someone or hurting and killing yourself, and it comes on unbelievably quickly,” said one Special Forces soldier diagnosed with permanent brain damage from Lariam. “It's just a sudden thought, it's the right thing to do. You'll get a mental picture, and it's in full color."

Also that year, the UPI report showed how mefloquine use was a factor in half of the suicides among troops in Iraq in 2003 -– and how suicides dropped by 50 percent after the Army stopped handing out the drug.

Read the entire story here.

Army limiting use of anti-malaria drug

LOS ANGELES — Almost four decades after inventing a potent anti-malarial drug, the Army has pushed it to the back of its medicine cabinet.

The dramatic about-face follows years of complaints and concerns that mefloquine caused psychiatric and physical side effects even as it was used around the globe as a front-line defense against the mosquito-borne disease that kills about 800,000 people a year.

“Mefloquine is a zombie drug. It’s dangerous, and it should have been killed off years ago,” said Dr. Remington Nevin, an epidemiologist and Army major who has published research that he said showed the drug can be potentially toxic to the brain. He believes the drop in prescriptions is a tacit acknowledgement of the drug’s serious problems.

Read the entire story here.