WorldNetDaily — mostly in the person of managing editor David Kupelian — has a thing for falsely smearing psychiatric drugs by directly blaming them for mass murder events, despite the fact that no direct link has ever been established.
WND reporter Cheryl Chumley joins in the smearing in her July 29 column:
But deceptions run deeper when it comes to gun control. For instance: The anti-Second Amendment crowd may slide this under the radar, but according to Linda Lagemann, a former licensed clinical psychologist with 23 years of experience who presently serves as a commissioner with the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, dozens of recent cases of high-profile shooters have shared more than an affinity for guns – they’ve shared a pill-popping background that included the taking of psychotropic drugs, some at least which were medically and legally prescribed.
As we noted when CNSNews.com’s Barbara Hollingsworth did it, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights was created by the Church of Scientology with the goal of attacking the field of psychiatry. Despite the name, as Stephen Wiseman points out, it’s not a human rights organization at all.
Chumley goes on to rant about other purported links between psychiatric drugs and mass killings, citing such impeccable sources as a rant-filled blog called DC Clothesline and the Western Journalism Center, which was founded by Chumley’s WND boss, Joseph Farah, and which collaborated with WND on a error-ridden book demanding President Obama’s impeachment just a year into his first term.
And Chumley, like Kupelian, cite no direct link between the drug that were taken and the acts they committed — remember, correlation does not equal causation. Nevertheless, Chumley concludes by declaring, “But guns are the problem? Seems like pill control might be the better argument.”
Chumley might have a better argument if wasn’t engaging in logical fallacies or using fringe sources to back them up.