by Ray Garton
Chloe didn’t understand how Roger could seem so at ease under the circumstances. His best friend had attacked him, then disappeared with his gun, and was out there somewhere, not himself, possibly in danger, possibly a danger to others—but Roger was smiling, completely relaxed, as if he’d just awakened from a nice afternoon nap.
“I couldn’t eat right now if I wanted to,” she said, her voice breathy and unsteady. She was so tense and anxious, she felt ready to crawl out of her own body in an electric rush. “How can you think about food now, Roger?”
He gave her a sad smile. “I’m not thinking about food, I’m thinking about Eli. Being worried and afraid makes me hungry.”
Chloe turned to Everett. “Everett, I’m scared for Eli. You said we’d talk when we got here. I want to know everything about this withdrawal. What is he going through right now? What’s going to happen to him?”
“Well, it varies from person to person,” Everett said, leaning forward with his elbows on the table, locking his hands together. “He could be experiencing one or more of a number of symptoms, or none at all. The severe withdrawal effects are rare, according to the manufacturer, but... well, it’s been my experience that there’s a difference between the word ‘rare’ as used by pharmaceutical companies and ‘rare’ as defined in the dictionary. Judging by what he did to Roger earlier... I’d say he’s not himself. He may be experiencing symptoms similar to those that made my patient snap today and attack others with a knife in my waiting room. Confusion, disorientation. Feelings of anger that could lead to violent behavior—” He glanced at Roger. “—and apparently already has. My biggest worry is akathisia.”
Chloe frowned. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
“It’s a potential side effect of certain meds, particularly psychiatric drugs. It creates an inability to sit still, to remain motionless. It can be seen in victims of Parkinson’s disease. It causes a person to be fidgety, creates a need to constantly move.”
Roger nodded as he said, “That’s how Eli was when he came over here today. Pacing, fidgeting—he couldn’t hold still. I started to wonder if he was doing coke again.”
Everett lowered his head and sighed. “That’s not good.”
“Why?” Chloe asked urgently. “I mean, what does that mean? So he fidgets, what harm can that do, right? Unless there’s more.”
Everett turned to her and nodded. “Akathisia can increase in severity. Just twitching and jerking is fairly harmless, although it’s uncomfortable. But as it gets worse, it creates an increasing sense of anxiety which can become overwhelming. My patient—the one who stabbed those people in my office—she said her thoughts hurt. That’s a pretty good description of the problem in the extreme. Akathisia causes such internal discomfort and anxiety that it can make it seem to the sufferer that the very act of thinking is painful. This causes behavior that differs wildly from one person to the next. As it worsens, the patient can become very dysphoric.”
“Dys-what?” Chloe said as Roger asked, “What’s that?” at the same time.
“Dysphoria is a crippling feeling of terror, a sense of growing danger, impending doom, paranoia. This can drive a person to extremely erratic behavior. I believe that’s what happened in my office.”
“Because of Paaxone?” Chloe asked.
Everett nodded.
Chloe’s eyes widened and stung with welling tears. “You mean Eli might be out there killing someone? He might be—”
Everett raised a hand, palm out, in a soothing gesture. “You have to understand that every person is different. The effects of a drug can vary widely from one person to the next. If Eli is experiencing withdrawal symptoms from Paaxone, they won’t necessarily be the same as those experienced by the woman in my office, or by anyone else.”
“But you think that’s what’s happening to him, right? That he’s having withdrawals?”
Everett nodded.
Chloe vaguely noticed that Falczek was sitting silently at the table frowning down at his glass of ice tea. He appeared to be tense, as if he were struggling to hold his tongue, growing more and more impatient.
She fumbled with her purse and removed her cell phone. She called Eli’s cell and waited. His voicemail picked up. “Eli,” she said, “please call me. As soon as you get this message. Will you do that, please? It’s... very important. Okay? I’m waiting for your call.” She sighed as she returned the cell phone to her purse. She looked at the others with uncertainty in her eyes. “I didn’t know what to say. If he thinks I’m scared, or that I’m hunting him down, I’m afraid he’ll... I don’t know.”
Roger said, “Eli thinks this is happening to a lot of people.” He told them about Eli’s theory that people were having violent outbursts due to the sudden unavailability of Paaxone, about the phone calls he had made that morning to the spouses and relatives of some of those people. “He said all of them had been taking Paaxone and had to stop when they couldn’t refill their prescriptions, and then they went crazy.”
Falczek scrubbed a hand downward over his face and shifted in his chair with a sigh.
“I don’t understand,” Chloe said. “If it’s possible for Paaxone to do this to people, then why the hell is it on the market? I mean, I thought there were long trials and tests, that drugs were determined to be safe before they were handed out to people.”
“There’s no such thing as a safe drug,” Everett said. “All drugs come with possible side effects, that’s the nature of the beast. But it’s true that drug trials aren’t as long or as... “ He stopped a moment, as if to search for the right word. “... as reliable as they used to be. For a number of reasons. Unfortunately, most of those reasons are connected in one way or another to money. Profit.”
“What about the government?” Roger said. “Isn’t that the FDA’s job? To make sure drugs are safe?”
Everett shrugged. “Used to be. Things have changed in the last twenty years. Especially the last ten. Restrictions have been relaxed allowing the pharmaceutical companies to pour a lot of money into the FDA. A lot of people at the FDA know they have cushy, six- and seven-figure jobs waiting for them at the pharmaceutical companies—after they’ve helped clear drugs through the FDA, and after they’ve provided favors for the pharmaceutical companies that will be giving them those cushy jobs. These days, the drug companies fund most of the studies that determine whether or not drugs are safe, and those studies conveniently produce results favorable to those companies. If the results aren’t favorable, they’re manipulated to appear favorable. The drug companies aren’t required to publish the results of those trials, so all we hear about them is what they want us to hear.”
Roger stared slack-jawed at Everett. “If you know all this, how can you prescribe these drugs?”
“I don’t prescribe them. I stopped.”
Falczek put his face in his hands and muttered, “Oh, Jesus, don’t get him started.”
Everett said, “I have a friend, Dr. Tara Varadaraj. An expert in clinical psychopharmacology. She’s been blowing the whistle on all this for the last fifteen years or more. She was one of the first people to speak out about the connection between antidepressants and things like anxiety, panic attacks, hostility, suicide, mania, impulsive behavior, akathisia, and other symptoms that can create violent behavior in people. Back in 1991, she sounded the alarm about Prozac—that it caused mania and violence and suicide. She wrote a book about it and based her information on research reports and clinical experience and on material she obtained from the FDA through the Freedom of Information Act. The evidence was already in existence, she just published it in a mass-market book and tried to warn people about what the drug was doing. On top of that, she had strong evidence that Prozac wasn’t helping anyone. Rather than relieving depression, it was making people worse.”
“This was in 1991?” Roger said, his face registering disbelief. “Twenty years ago?”
“She wasn’t the first to blow this whistle. An officer of the FDA whose job it was to evaluate t
he risks of Prozac reported to the agency that it was making depression worse in a lot of patients, and it was producing the same effects as amphetamines. That was in the mid-1980s. Tara’s book came out in 1991, and still nothing was done.”
Chloe’s eyes had been growing wider as Everett spoke. “How can that be?” she said in nearly a whisper, still thinking about Eli out there somewhere, alone, maybe going crazy. “If people knew about this all these years, how could those drugs still be sold and prescribed by doctors?”
“None of this received a lot of publicity,” Everett said. “It’s not sexy enough. It’s not the kind of thing that boosts ratings or sells newspapers.”
“You’re saying that still nobody’s done anything?” Roger said.
“Well, finally, in 2004, the FDA held public hearings about suicidality in children taking antidepressants, and a crowd of angry people showed up to talk about the adverse effects being experienced by people of all ages—their spouses, children, siblings. These people told horror stories about psychosis and murder caused by Prozac. Amazingly, after nearly two decades of ignoring the evidence, the committee chairman listened. A guy named Wayne Goodman. The subject of the hearings was the safety of antidepressants prescribed to children, and Goodman concluded that they were not only dangerous and causing children to behave violently and commit suicide, but they were ineffective, as well. The FDA released a Public Health Advisory.”
“That’s all?” Chloe said, surprising herself by almost shouting the question. “If the drugs were causing these problems in children, what about adults?”
Everett shrugged again. “There’s an abundance of evidence that the same effects are being seen in adults taking these drugs. There’ve been some concessions, like slightly stronger wording in the product warnings. But it’s hard not to think those things were done only to silence the critics. Meanwhile, the public is still largely in the dark, still believing everything the drug companies tell them in TV commercials and literature, still believing everything the drug companies tell their doctors. What’s amazing is that the doctors believe it—and repeat it. And the pharmaceutical companies are pulling in hundreds of billions a year from these drugs. There’s an old saying that goes, ‘Money talks and bullshit walks.’ Well, these days, money talks even louder and everything else walks. Everything including people’s safety.”
Chloe said, “You mean... this is all just about money?”
“Just about money?” Everett said. “Everything’s about money. Pharmaceuticals are no different. Unless, of course, you’re a member of the tinfoil-beanie crowd. The conspiracy theorists think this is all part of a big plot by the Illuminati to make us so crazy and foggy-headed that we won’t be able to stand up to the coming totalitarian New World Order. Personally, I think money is a much more reasonable explanation. If you trace anything back far enough, no matter how ugly or horrible it may be, you’ll find that, somewhere along the way, somebody’s making a lot of money off of it. This is no different.”
“I still don’t understand how doctors can prescribe this stuff to their patients knowing the risks,” Roger said.
“Most don’t know the risks,” Everett said. “Doctors do a lot more than see patients in their office. The business of maintaining a practice is overwhelming. The paperwork alone is enough to choke an army, and that’s only part of it. These days, a doctor is required to be part businessman, part tax attorney, part malpractice attorney part—it just goes on and on. We doctors are always telling people to make sure they get enough sleep, but the fact is, most doctors don’t get enough sleep because of the demands and pressures they face. A doctor running a practice doesn’t have time to do all the reading that’s required to keep up with everything that’s going on in medicine. He’s forced to rely on quick, easily-digested information that’s compiled and summarized by others. Unfortunately, much of that information is compiled and summarized by drug companies or organizations that are friendly to drug companies thanks to big fat donations. That means the doctor is being told what the drug companies want the doctor to be told.
“And then there are the mountains of money drug companies spend each year buying the doctors. Gifts, expensive meals and trips, and generous educational grants—these are just euphemisms for bribes, by the way, which is why I don’t take them anymore. Doctors might get a pass when it comes to their huge workloads, but they’re not fooling anybody when they allow drug companies to turn them into common whores.”
He leaned back in the chair and shrugged. “But nobody knows about it. It’s all out in the open, but it never gets talked about, the media doesn’t cover it. If people knew just how intimately involved their doctors are with pharmaceutical companies, the waiting rooms would be filled with angry mobs. But... “ He let out a long, heavy sigh and waved a hand in a gesture of helpless dismissal. “If you read the books written by my friend Tara, you’ll probably know more about what’s wrong with all these drugs than any practicing doctor. And you’ll certainly know more than all the patients who end up being the ignorant victims of this system. It’s just that nobody seems to—”
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Falczek said, “but I can’t sit here any longer, Everett. We need to talk, and we need to talk now.”
Everett said, “I’m sorry for hogging the conversation. Go ahead, Falczek, please.”
Falczek shook his head. “Not here.”
Everett frowned. “Why not? This is something that affects all of us now. We were going to tell Eli what you learned in Washington, so Chloe and Roger would’ve found out anyway.”
Falczek sighed as he slumped in his chair and scrubbed his face with both hands.
“What’s wrong?” Everett said.
Falczek leaned forward again, folded his arms on the table, and looked at Everett. “This is a lot bigger than we thought.”
“It sounds like it,” Everett said with a nod. “What did Renny tell you?”
Falczek chuckled coldly. “To be honest, I’d be surprised if Renny were still alive right now.”
“What?”
Falczek looked at Chloe and Roger a moment, then back at Everett. “It seems someone tried to kill Renny’s friend Lauren—the one who passed this information on to him. And someone tried to kill me last night because of what Renny told me about this drug. That person killed two old friends of mine right in front of me. If their dog hadn’t attacked the killer, he would’ve killed me. I took his gun and got the hell out of there. Left my friends lying dead on the floor and their poor dog whining over their bodies. On my way to an airport that I thought was far enough away to be safe, I pulled over and threw the gun into a pond for the catfish to nibble on. I have no doubt that whoever sent that killer will be sending someone else for me very soon. And if they find out that I’ve told the three of you what I know, you’ll be next.”
For a long time, no one spoke and no one moved. Chloe stared at Falczek, as did Everett and Roger.
Finally, his voice low and a little hoarse, Everett said, “I think you should explain, Falczek.”
5.
Rubinek came out of the shower and scrubbed the thin towel over his body. He left the small bathroom as he dried and went into the dumpy motel room he’d rented as a base of operations. CNN was on the TV and a panel of talking heads was discussing the resignation of Senator Walter Veltman, which the senator had just announced at an impromptu press conference within the last hour. They kept rerunning Veltman’s brief resignation speech.
The Carriage House Motor Inn was a couple of miles from the airport in Santa Vermelha. It was a rundown little motel with a drained pool in the courtyard and a noisy ice machine just outside Rubinek’s room.
Using his fake Gordon Kainer ID, he’d rented a car at the airport. Santa Vermelha had the worst air Rubinek had ever seen in his life. It was thick with smoke, looked filthy, and it burned his eyes and nostrils. He’d driven around until he spotted the Carriage House. It was exactly the kind of cheap, nondescript, anonymous place he pre
ferred. Before getting a room there, he’d called Gall’s contact and met with him at a nearby bowling alley to get the gun he’d requested. Then he’d picked up a burger and some fries at a Carl’s Jr. drive-through. In the room, he’d eaten his burger and familiarized himself with the gun, then he’d taken a long, relaxing shower.
He planned to make quick work of John Falczek, then hop a plane back home. He didn’t anticipate any problems with the job, although he couldn’t ignore the nagging feeling in his gut that something didn’t smell right about it. Not that there was anything necessarily right about any of his jobs, given his line of work. But there were jobs that were so routine they ran together in a blur. Then there were jobs that just didn’t smell right, and this was one of them. Something didn’t smell right about Victor Gall, either. Rubinek couldn’t shake the feeling that Gall was up to something that could possibly get both of them into trouble. But of the two of them, the only one Rubinek was concerned about was Rubinek.
“Mine is not to wonder why,” he muttered with a sigh as he took fresh clothes from his bag. But the words were hollow, empty.
Senator Veltman’s resignation speech was being rerun on TV. The gray-haired senator stood at a microphone, looking at his notes. His hair was short and he wore small glasses with dark rims. He had a long face that appeared even longer now. His chin moved back and forth a few times before he finally lifted his head, looked out at the waiting reporters, and spoke. Rubinek had missed the live broadcast of the speech, so he sat on the edge of the bed and watched.
“It has been a difficult month for my family as well as my constituents,” the senator began. His voice was hoarse and thick with suppressed emotion. “It has also been a difficult month for the United States, because this sort of thing is never in the best interest of our nation. I have always maintained my innocence in the face of these outlandish charges, and I continue to do so. But this has reached a point beyond guilt or innocence. It has become a stumbling block to progress and an embarrassment to this country. The time has come to bring it to a halt, and that is what I am going to do. Therefore, I am announcing my resignation as United States senator, effective immediately. My twenty-two years of public service have been enriching and humbling. With each passing year, my love for this country of ours and the people in it has only grown fuller and deeper. We too often become so bogged down in negativity and anger and pettiness, we sometimes forget that living in America provides all of us with an abundance of opportunities, blessings and freedoms envied by the rest of the world. Serving this country has been an honor and privilege. I only hope that I have given back a fraction of what this country has given me.” He stopped, looked down at his notes, and coughed quietly. Voice cracking with emotion, he added, “Thank you all, and god bless you.” He started to turn away, as if to leave. But he stopped, seemed to think about it for a moment, and turned back to the microphone. His white eyebrows lowered over piercing eyes.