Medicated military focus of Tribeca film

'OFF LABEL': Tribeca Film Captures Our Insatiable Appetite for Prescription Drugs
By SUSAN DONALDSON JAMES
April 18, 2012

Courtesy Andy Duffy
Andy Duffy, 26, was prescribed dozens of drugs for post-traumatic stress, but they nearly destroyed his life.

Andy Duffy's first encounter with the world of drugs was as an Army medic at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq where he forced resistant prisoners to endure excruciating pain.

Sgt. Duffy says superior officers ordered him to inject the veins of prisoners with 14-gauge needles to hydrate -- and to intimidate -- them during hunger strikes.

"These needles are used for really massive trauma … not in the veins but to put a hole through the chest to relieve pressure," he said.

The Iowa City boy had signed up just days after his 17th birthday -- March 19, 2003 -- in the midst of war lust after 9/11.

Then in a 2006 attack by rebels, shrapnel tore apart his lower right flank and back as Americans readied to hand the prison over to Iraqi authorities. "They mortared us instead," said Duffy.

Many of his fellow soldiers never made it back. Duffy did in October of 2006, but with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and a mountain of prescription drugs that he says only made him worse.

"It was obvious altering the chemicals in my brain was not the answer," he said. "My [PTSD] was not an imbalance, but from an experience."

The film is dedicated to Mary Weiss of Minneapolis, whose son Dan Markingson was admitted in 2003 to a psychiatric hospital with delusions and was prescribed the antidepressant Seroquel by his attending physician, who was involved in the marketing study of that drug.

Weiss said she believed her son was going to hurt himself and begged doctors to take him out of the study.

"He was legal age, so we couldn't," says Weiss in the film. "But he was deteriorating and gaunt and believed he was plagued by devils. He was psychotic."

After five months in the trial, at age 27, Markingson, slashed himself to death in a gruesome suicide. "They let him die," says his mother, Mary Weiss.

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