The Maddened William Rehnquist Fleeing a CIA Plot to Assassinate Him Makes It to the Hospital Lobby in His Pajamas Before Psychiatrists Wrestle Him to the Ground

Wow: William Rehnquist hopped up on 1500 mg a day of jelly-bellies, inducing hallucinations and paranoia, with his pusher--Capitol physician Freeman Cary--giving Rehnquist a three-month perscription every month:

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/16377178.htm: Also detailed in the declassified [FBI] file was Rehnquist's 1981 hospital stay for treatment of back pain and his dependence on powerful prescription pain-relief medication.... Placidyl, which Rehnquist had taken for at least 10 years, according to a summary of a 1970 medical examination. When Rehnquist checked into a hospital in 1981 for a weeklong stay, doctors stopped administering the drug, causing what a hospital spokesman at the time said was a "disturbance in mental clarity."

The FBI file, citing one of his physicians, said Rehnquist experienced withdrawal symptoms that included going to the hospital lobby in his pajamas in a bid to escape. He imagined that there was a Central Intelligence Agency plot against him, and he also seemed to discern changes in the patterns on the hospital curtains.,Rehnquist thought he heard voices outside his room discussing various plots against him.

The doctor said Placidyl is a highly toxic drug and that she could not understand why anyone would prescribe it, especially for long periods. Prior to his hospitalization, Rehnquist occasionally slurred his speech in his questions to lawyers at Supreme Court arguments. Those problems ceased when he changed medications, the doctor said.

Charns said that some of the censored documents provide intriguing hints of what else Rehnquist's file might contain. In one previously secret memo from 1971, an FBI official wrote, "No persons interviewed during our current or 1969 investigation furnished information bearing adversely on Rehnquist's morals or professional integrity; however ..." The next third of the page is blacked out, under the disclosure law's exception for matters of national security. "It would be nice to know what is still classified, three decades later," Charns said.

This is the AP article which hit the wires at 5 PM Pacific time. The law.com story by Tony Mauro hit the net at noon Pacific time Wednesday. There appears to be nothing in either the Thursday Washington Post or the Thursday New York Times.

Comments

[nettie hartsock]

This is a fantastic post and literally made my 2:13am evening because it made me laugh out loud.

[Joe]

Check out this 1965 print ad for Placidyl ... http://www.biopsychiatry.com/misc/placidyl.html
"nudges your patient to sleep"
"gentle as a lullaby"

[Emily]

That Rehnquist was taking waaaay too many pills for quite a while is not a new story. But I'd never heard about the part about the paranoia when he went cold turkey.

[bakho]

Maybe this explains is why the justice was so out of touch?

[arbogast]

Great post. Great post.

No Earl Warren he.

A Rush Limbaugh? A Noell Bush?

[ken melvin]

Answers to questions long past.

[metroplexual]

i say this explains alot, but it still doesn't explain Scalia, Scalito, and the supreme sexual harrasser? What is in their closets?

[Anderson]

Polo, was that dog once Chief Justice of the United States?

[Ken Houghton]

Filed at 10:49 am ET today:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Rehnquist-Files.html?pagewanted=print

[William Bennett]

Placidyl (ethchlorvinol) was a sleep agent marketed from at least the mid-sixties to 1999, but then withdrawn from the market. It was seen as a safter alternative to barbiturates. Like all sleep agents, it could work well for some people but cause horrendous problems in others. Rehnquist's prescribing physician may have been ill-advised to keep him on it, but even more unfortunate was the decision to discontinue it abruptly. From this account, what happened was that he got a version of delirium tremens: brain dysfunction resulting from withdrawal. Delirium can happen when alcohol, Valium-like drugs, or barbiturates are abruptly stopped after chronic use. Delusions, hallucinations, disorientation, and agitation are typical features. Much as I disapproved of Rehnquist's judicial philosophy, here I would see him as suffering from a medical mistake (or several of them), and I would not infer that his terror about the CIA tells us anything about how he typically thought about anything.

[andres]

What's so weird about his post-Placidyl suspicions? They sound very much in the spirit of an Oliver Stone movie or the X-Files. Maybe he was on to something ;-)

[Jim]

Morals? Well perhaps he wasn't found in bed with . . . . but I do recall prominent SF attorney James Brosnahan testimony at Renquist's elevation to Chief Justice confirmation hearings in the mid 1980's that Brosnahan as Assistant US Attorney in Phoenix in the 1950's had observed the former CJ, a new attorney and Republican activist, "discouraging" minority voters appearing to vote from casting their ballots. Perhaps that is what was crossed out in the FBI report.