Too many prescriptions, too little talk - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

Too many prescriptions, too little talk

Army Warrant Officer 1 Judson Mount was taking several medications simultaneously while recovering from severe shrapnel wounds at the Warrior Transition Unit in San Antonio.

The painkiller Tramadol and the antidepressant Zoloft were a high-risk combination, medical experts say, and it required close supervision.

But Mount was dead of an accidental drug overdose in the WTU barracks for two days before anyone found the married father of two.

The former enlisted tank commander who deployed to Iraq twice was found, forgotten and alone, on April 7, 2009, in his room next to several jars of pills. The cause of death was an accidental overdose of Tramadol. The "contributory effects" of the antidepressant "could not be excluded," according to the military autopsy report.

Whatever killed her son, Joyce Mount, a 63-year-old retired bank worker in Tennessee, does not blame the Army.

"It was a person — a pharmacist or a doctor or something - not the Army," said Mount, whose father was a retired Air Force senior master sergeant. "The Army's been good to me. They've been good to all of us. They were here at the funeral. But I feel like somewhere in the system, somebody has failed or messed up."

WO1 Mount was one of at least 32 service members to die from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs while under the care of what are supposed to be the military's most highly supervised medical units during the past three years.

Army Sgt. Franklin Barnett, a 29-year-old combat engineer and father of three, also died while under the care of the WTU in San Antonio. He was wounded by a car bomb in Iraq and received a Purple Heart in October 2008. His widow blamed his June 2009 death on communications failures by Army doctors.

"If the doctors would talk to each other, then they wouldn't have a problem," Diane Barnett said. "He was on four different kinds of medication that pretty much clashed with each other."

Franklin Barnett was taking "antidepressants and sleeping pills," his wife said — adding that he may not have taken his medications as prescribed. "He was forgetful — he probably forgot that he took his med and he took some more."

Accidental drug overdoses in the Army WTUs began to draw public attention nearly three years ago after the death of Sgt. Gerald Cassidy, found dead in his barracks at Fort Knox, Ky,. in September 2007.

He died after taking a mix of drugs that included several strong narcotic painkillers and Celexa, an antidepressant. His military autopsy concluded that the drugs' "combined synergistic" effects caused cardiac arrest.

Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., heard about the death and, as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, demanded an Army investigation.

"The enemy could not kill him, but our own government did," Bayh said in November 2007 during a committee hearing.

Then-Army Secretary Pete Geren called the circumstances of Cassidy's death "unacceptable," and Army leaders promised to investigate.

Some family members remain angry at the Army.

"They still haven't owned up to it and said, 'You know what? We killed your husband,'" said Susan Nichols, widow of Sgt. Robert Nichols, 32, who died at the WTU in San Antonio.

Diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder and suffering primarily from psychiatric problems, Robert Nichols was taking a mix of 11 drugs that left him groggy and confused during the last few weeks of his life. They included Percocet, Valium, Celexa, the antipsychotic Seroquel, and Depakote, an anti-seizure drug used to treat major depression and bipolar disorder, Susan said.

"I blame those who prescribed the pills and were watching over him," she said. "They should have been able to see the signs that something was wrong."