Florida Police Searching for Source of Violent, Naked Rampages: It's probably something old and familiar

Florida has been beset by a veritable wave of violent, naked rampages by people – men mostly – who have gone on rampages, confronted police, tearing off their clothes shouted gibberish and fougt with super-human strength against all attempts to stop them.

The Sun-Sentinal posits the problem thusly:  The cases – which happened within four days of each other and left one dead, three injured and a 17-year-old facing a host of charges – may have more in common than their bizarre details, authorities say. They may have also both been triggered by a rare brain malfunction.

I posit that the “rare brain malfunction” could have been PCP, which apparently the experts in Florida are unaware of.

The article talks to experts who say the outbursts could be attributed to “excited delirium syndrome” that can strike people under high stress who are not getting enough sleep and may have a rare genetic abnormality that causes them to excessively overheat (causing them to strip naked) and go berserk.  It can also happen to people who take PCP. 

PCP is a drug that was not so much popular as prevalent in the late 1980’s until the early 1990’s when Rodney King was infamously beaten by a host of LA Police officers for minutes, and still managed to get back up over and over again.  King’s superhuman strength: PCP.  Hospitals in Chicago – which I grew up just outside of – dealt with this years ago: people coming in on a high, then going on a rampage until someone hit them with a super-tranquilizer.  In the street, people just got shot in the head.  If someone was going completely insane with superhuman strength, those around didn’t mess around, and the drug got less prevalent, as these things do.

I am not saying that I have any personal knowledge of any of the persons who were profiled in the report or that the persons in the report used drugs.  Or, if they are tested, that they took any drugs knowingly.  There used to be this nasty habit of people dipping cigarette paper in PCP, and then people unwittingly getting it in their systems.  The paper also notes that the cases of "excited delirium" peaked during the 1980s, also the peak of PCP use.  The toxicology reports have not come back on the three dead delirious, naked, super-human attackers.  T They won't mean much, however, if the toxicologists don't test for the right drugs, or if the drugs left the person's system.    What I'm saying is that there is a set of symptoms with a known cause, and then there is an unproven hypothesis about rare genetic abnormalities and unconfirmed suppositions.  I say control PCP, which may be coming back on the streets.

There’s a principal of Ockham’s Razor.  William of Ockham (1287-1347) laid down the philosophical and logical principal that among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected.  In practice, it doesn’t always work.  Empirical proof always trumps philosophical theories.  But in Florida, now, there is a lot of theory. 

There is the theory of rare brain disorders, “excited delirium syndrome” and the like.  A clean theory, of a street drug that in high doses causes and has caused the exact behaviors that are being attributed to these new symptoms, ought to get tested first.  Perhaps someone should test the Floridians who have gone on naked, super-human strength rampages for PCP.  If they come back clean, then let's talk about excited delirium syndrome and rare genetic abnormalities all manifesting in a short time period in a small geographic area.  That would be an interesting story of clustering of illness, rather than the comeback of a drug scourge from two decades ago.