Sheila Matthews, co-founder of the national non-profit parent organization AbleChild, detailed her work on crafting an “outstanding” bill recently filed in the Tennessee General Assembly that is focused on reforming the process medical examiner’s offices must follow in terms of testing for psychotropic drugs when performing autopsies on the bodies of mass shooters.
HB 2933, if enacted, would require a medical examiner’s office or regional forensic center to determine and document current both psychotropic and prescription drug use from the past 10 years by a deceased individual who died under “suspicious, unusual, or unnatural circumstances.”
The bill would also require the medical examiner’s office to “disclose the psychotropic drug use of the individual to the public, to ensure accurate vital statistics relating to homicides and suicides.”
HB 2933 is sponsored by State Representative Mary Littleton (R-Dickson). Its companion legislation in the Senate, SB 2937, is sponsored by State Senator Rusty Crowe (R-Johnson City).
Matthews (pictured above), who helped craft the first-of-its-kind bill, said there needs to be “stronger testing” and the medical examiner’s office “needs to be reformed,” as current autopsy panels haven’t been updated in some time and there is not enough clarity on what kinds of drugs the panels test for.
This, Matthews says, would help determine the link between Big Pharma drugs and mass shooters.
“We need stronger testing and the medical examiner’s office needs to be reformed,” Matthews explained on Wednesday’s edition of The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy. “We’re having a national crisis in getting these toxicology reports of these shooters and they’re hiding behind HIPAA. When you commit a crime, HIPAA really doesn’t apply to you.”
“The nation needs this because the mental health industry is getting a tremendous amount of funding each time one of these mass shootings happen,” Matthews added. “We’re funding it for more and more mental health, yet they’re not accountable for the dollars that they aren’t spending because the FDA has placed the black box suicide warning on the antidepressants, linking them to increased risk of violence and suicide. So they’re not training the police correctly in collecting that data.”
Matthews praised the bill’s sponsors for having a “tremendous amount of courage” in filing the “model legislation.”
“This is model legislation. It is a powerful representation of where the country should be going because we are not going to solve these mass shootings unless we clean up the corruption, which is by NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness), which is funded by pharmaceutical companies, and their influence in training the police and their influence in the medical examiner’s office. So this bill is an outstanding bill. Lawmakers had a tremendous amount of courage to get it filed,” Matthews said.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Sheila Matthews” by ablechild.
