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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
"Law and Order: SVU" pulls details from my reporting for its gripping finale. So why is the "reporter" such an ink-stained wretch?
May 25, 2005 | When you turn on one of the "Law and Order" shows and it's styled to look as if it's been "ripped from the headlines," what that really means is "ripped off" from the headlines. Tuesday's episode of "Law and Order: SVU" looked like it had been ripped from the headlines of three years of investigative reporting that cost me a lot of sweat and shoe leather.
No, I did not get a dime. And no one from NBC even called to say how truly inspiring my work was, or how the truth really can be stranger than fiction -- or even that the damn episode existed. Instead, my dad saw a commercial for it on TV and sent me an e-mail.
In Tuesday night's season finale, two otherwise wholesome New York City police officers suddenly turn evil, beat up their wives -- one murders his wife -- then attempt suicide; one survives. Detectives Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) figure out that the two cops served in the same Army Reserve unit in Afghanistan and that a pattern of bizarre behavior began once they returned.
It turns out the Army gave these two cops a controversial anti-malaria drug the NBC attorneys decided to call "Quinium" that can make you go nuts long after you take the pills. (In addition to NBC's legal issues for fictionalizing the drug name, most anti-malarial pills are related to a class of drugs called quinolones, which are known to have psychological side effects. They are a man-made derivative of quinine, the age-old substance for fighting malaria from the cinchona tree.)
The wily detectives then figure out that a similarly weird kind of violence happened before, in the summer of 2002 at Fort Bragg, when Special Forces soldiers returned from Afghanistan and tragically murdered their wives and then killed themselves. Those soldiers, on TV, also took "Quinium."
What was really freaky (and most surprising) about the "Law and Order: SVU" episode is just how eerily close NBC got to what actually happened. In 2002, three Fort Bragg soldiers came back from Afghanistan, murdered their wives and killed themselves. I was a reporter at UPI, and my partner, Dan Olmsted, and I obtained 1,500 pages of internal drug company documents suggesting the possibility that a malaria drug being used in Afghanistan -- and one taken by all three Fort Bragg soldiers -- might be causing suicide, violent behavior and general madness. We jumped on a plane to Fort Bragg to begin what would become a three-year effort to gather string on the drug.
The drug we wrote about is called Lariam, or mefloquine. It was invented by the U.S. Army in the 1970s. It's great for preventing malaria, but it has some minor drawbacks, like causing psychosis, suicidal thoughts, depression and paranoia, which have been reported to last "long after" taking the pills, according to the FDA. There is some evidence that it may permanently damage the brain stem of some people who take it, though the drug manufacturer, Roche Pharmaceuticals, says it is safe and effective. Roche also says there is no credible scientific evidence showing that if you take Lariam you might do something crazy like kill yourself or somebody else.
That is what the makers of "Quinium" said on TV last night, as well. And that's not all. On "SVU," the standoff with police and the suicide attempt of one soldier-turned-police-officer on his front lawn closely matches the successful suicide of a Special Forces soldier on his front lawn in Colorado Springs, Colo., in March of 2004. The TV officer survives, and is later charged with cowardice, like the real-world Staff Sgt. Georg Pogany, whom the Army charged with cowardice, apparently for suffering a panic attack from the drug in October 2003. (The Army later dropped all charges.)
The side effects portrayed on TV were shockingly accurate: panic attacks, hallucinations, paranoia (one police officer is convinced his neighbors are tapping his phones). The violent attack by one police officer on his boss is really close to the sudden, uncontrollable rage described by folks who say they got sick from the real drug. He also describes dreams as bordering on hallucinations, of spiders coming out of his hands -- like a Peace Corps volunteer I once wrote about who hallucinated giant spiders on her bed. The cop describes hallucinating the gross distortion of faces, something Dan and I heard countless times.
