He also says that in the mornings he has the almost uncontrollable urge to slit his own throat with his razor. That is chillingly just right; people reported sudden, uncontrollable urges to do crazy stuff from this drug. That means murder. That means suicide.

On TV, the police officers call the day they took their weekly malaria pills in Afghanistan "Manic Mondays," because they would feel really nuts on those days as the drug began to build up in their bodies. Yup. That's what they call it.

In the story, the Army totally stonewalls Assistant District Attorney Casey Novak (Diane Neal). I think describing the Army's response to Dan and me as "stonewalling" might be too polite.

"SVU" cited studies by the drug company showing that probably one in 10,000 people goes nuts on the drug, but a British study puts that number at one in 140. That was ripped from the pages of some real scientific journals about Lariam, as well.

On TV, there is a military doctor who figures out that the drug is causing permanent brain stem damage. He later recants under what looks like extreme pressure from the Army, shattering Novak's case and letting the military get away with murder. He is the real coward. In real life, some soldiers have alleged the same thing about a Navy doctor, whom Dan wrote about.

The one thing I don't think Dan and I saw in our reporting was rape, but "SVU" had these police officers raping their wives. Maybe that was a contrivance necessary to put the case in the hands of the special victims unit.

And here is another really screwy contortion of the facts: The reporter in the episode is portrayed (at least initially) as a bottom-dwelling catfish, at best. We first see him in the episode picking through the trash! Stabler and Benson want to get the truth, but the ornery reporter from "The Sentinel" doesn't want to cooperate. He just wants his scoop. "Call me when you get a conscience," Stabler yells in anger.

OK. Do you know how many times I tried to get cops interested in this stuff? Can you possibly imagine how much a reporter would like to cooperate with a district attorney who wants to go through the Army's underwear drawers?

Later, the reporter has a change of heart. At least NBC notes that this particular ink-stained wretch was way, way ahead of the game and had it all figured out. But he hands all his electronic files over to the cops. No reporter would ever, ever do that. But the reporter's comment when he does it gave me chills: "Now go see how far the rabbit hole goes, as they say." Every investigative reporter wonders that about his story, every story -- if there's an end, and how far it can lead. In that fleeting moment, even the wretch seemed realistic.

At Fort Bragg in the summer of 2002, Dan and I documented a whole list of odd behaviors among the soldiers that seemed to mimic the known side effects of Lariam. The Army tried to say we were nuts. But we had other evidence, including thousands of pages of internal drug company documents showing Roche tracking violent and suicidal behavior among folks taking Lariam for over a decade. We would later do hundreds of interviews with Peace Corps volunteers and soldiers who said they had been horribly harmed by the drug. Soldiers say the drug has ravaged U.S. troops since the Somalia debacle in the early 1990s, the last time it was handed out en masse prior to the war on terrorism. In "Law and Order: SVU," the Army was well aware of that damage to troops.

Then in 2003, the Army started giving it to some units in Iraq. You may recall the Army also had a serious suicide problem among troops there in 2003, which has since disappeared -- the same time the Army stopped handing out Lariam. In fact, Dan and I showed that of the suicides in 2003, half of the dead soldiers came from units taking Lariam, contrary to what the Army's top doctor told Congress. Once the Army stopped dispensing Lariam in Iraq, the suicide rate dropped -- by half. The reporter portrayed on NBC last night rattled this off as a shocking statistic. We agree.

We also showed that the last six Special Forces soldiers who committed suicide -- a type of soldier rarely known to kill themselves -- had taken Lariam.

But there was one last leap of logic that TV could take, but we couldn't. The detectives decide at the end of "Law and Order: SVU" that the military is well aware of what the drug does to soldiers. That they have made a cold, hard cost-benefit analysis that it is worth the deaths of some soldiers -- and even their wives -- to prevent malaria. They think this drug is better than the alternatives and they don't care who it hurts and they will cover it up if they have to.

Dan and I never found any evidence that that was the case. We may never know. "But at the end of "Law and Order: SVU," the detectives worry about how many GIs might be ticking time bombs. We wonder, too.

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