Involuntarily Intoxicated

"We've got 12-year-old kids, we give them pills and say, 'Here, take this,' as if they had some choice to disobey," Mr. [Andy] Vickery [a defense attorney] said. "And we know it's a mind-altering pill. What in the name of God are we doing to our children?"

from "Boy Who Took Antidepressants Is Convicted in Killings"

By SHAILA DEWAN and BARRY MEIER

New York Times, Feb. 16, 2005

The New York Times > National > Boy Who Took Antidepressant Is Convicted in Killings

Christopher Pittman, 15, told the jury an antidepressant -- specifically, the SSRI Zoloft -- made him kill his grandparents. His attorneys and supporters say he was "involuntarily intoxicated," given a powerful chemical he probably did not completely understand without explicit consent. Pfizer, Zoloft's manufacturer, laments the tragedy that the drug neither helped enough with Pittman's mental illness, nor caused the criminal acts. Christopher's "maternal step-grandfather" warned the rest of us, "This could happen to you."

And it could, I suppose. Like Christopher Pittman's maternal step-grandfather, we could see violence up close from a place we never expected it. We could be surprised, saddened, frightened by the behavior of someone we thought we knew. We could suffer from mental illness in ourselves or in people we love. We could be unable to prevent it. We could wonder why we were so subjected, or so spared.

And we could be involuntarily intoxicated. Some of us, yes, with legally prescribed mind-altering drugs, even the doctors prescribing them don't truly understand yet. Some with drugs of a different sort. Some with pain - whether raw and new or crusted over, buried under what appears healed though we know it is not.

People become involuntarily intoxicated with love, too. Others with joy, with pride, with exercise and food, endorphins and adrenaline.

But most of the time, most of us don't need to be involuntarily intoxicated. We seek it out.

The growing "Prozac nation," we hear about, or this new "Zoloft defense" is not so new. It's just the newest form of intoxication. Involuntary? That sure would give us a break on taking any responsibility for our drunken state. But is anything completely involuntary? Could we even assess that?

I don't know why Christopher Pittman, at 12, shot his grandparents each once in the head, before setting their house on fire and driving away in their car. I don't know why he lied at first to police or why hours earlier he'd been violent with a classmate, or why he took the punishment of his grandparents so hard. I try to imagine why, searching news accounts for clues of his family, his story, his truth. I try to find why a 12-year-old boy would want to be intoxicated, blinded to the world already.

His defense would say, of course, that the point is he didn't want to become intoxicated at all, that it was the act of the drugs. The jury said it was his youth that made the case a challenge at all. I can't know how the drugs affected him. Nor can I guess whether his fights with schoolmates, his acting out at home that prompted the prescription and family decision that he should live with his grandparents, were attempts to intoxicate himself.

I wish I could. I want to know, as if knowing intent will make it understandable, will put the world back into clean lines again.

Instead, I just wonder. I wonder what the difference is between "I was drunk, I didn't know what I was doing," and "mind-altering drugs affected me. They made me do it." And how different are either of those propositions from "I was joking. I didn't mean it," or, in fact,
from "mental illness makes me act this way. I'm depressed, I'm scarred, I'm wounded."

I don't wonder whether Christopher is guilty or innocent, whether we should blame children on drugs for the way they're affected by these chemicals. None of us really know what these chemicals do, especially to children. (But this case is not just about children, of course. Phil Hartman's wife's murder-suicide was only the most publicized of Zoloft-gone-bad stories that seem to make drugs, if not the primary cause of bad decisions, a supporting actor at least.)

What I wonder about is why we've devised so many ways to intoxicate ourselves as a culture, and why it's so important to believe this act of intoxication is involuntary. If, as a parent, we give our child a drug that we know hasn't yet had time to be studied properly, or we take one ourselves, or we go to a bar, or we fall in love, or we get a burst of energy, or a wave of depressive exhaustion, can we ever really assess the exact percentage of our willful participation in these intoxicating events?

Some days involuntary intoxication sounds pretty darn good to me. Other days, days when I'm feeling strong, solid in myself, I don't want to intoxicate myself at all. And then there are those murky other in-between days when I feel okay but for minutes or moments I intoxicate myself with drinks at a bar, with comfort food, with friends, with love and sex, with daydreams and slumber, and yes, sometimes, with antidepressants. I call those days life.