No one else points out that Hassan at Fort Hood had pleny of access to drugs. It needs to be said and looked at.
Major Malik Nadal Hasan, an army psychiatrist, who killed 14 and wounded 31 others in a mass murder at Fort Hood, Texas after getting “upset” over being given orders to deploy to Iraq. The tragedy is so well-known only one observation bears mentioning, which other commentators seem to have completely ignored: psychiatrists have access to all sorts of drugs that are capable of causing distortions of perception, egomania and grandiosity, which in rare instances can lead a person afflicted with addiction to commit mass murder. Seven-year-old boys were turned into little killing machines in the Sierra Leone civil war by feeding them drug cocktails containing tranquilizers and amphetamines. Hasan had plenty of access to such drugs. While we may be frustrated in proving or disproving the idea that he used them, we need to keep in mind the example of Anthrax killer Bruce E. Ivins, whose alcoholism eluded almost all the journalists and “experts” (described in the top story at August 2008 edition of TAR).