Instructions for FDA drug tally project

Thanks for chipping in

See this video on YouTube for a quick “visual learning” of how to gather the data for this project.

Here are the steps for helping build a database of the adverse reactions to psychotropic medications that may have a bearing on gun violence.

  1. We will send you the name of one generic medication at a time (in this example, we will use “fluvoxamine”, the generic name for Luvox).
  2. Go to the FDA web site at https://fis.fda.gov/.
  3. Click on the “FDA Adverse Events Reporting …” square.
  4. Click on the box that says “Reaction”
  5. Key-in the generic drug name. In the resulting list, click just those medication that begin with the drugs name.
  6. Click on the menu item “Reaction” (hover hint currently reads “Cases by Reaction Term”).
  7. A list of reaction groups will be presented. Click on “psychiatric disorders” and then click the green check mark.
  8. Twice, once for violent reactions, and again for delusional reactions (our classification, not the FDA’s), do the following:
    1. Click the drop-down button that says “reaction”
    2. Enter the first few characters of the reaction name from the list in the Google spreadsheet and click on (check-mark) the matching entry (“violent” or “delusional”) that you are working on … NOT BOTH IN ONE PASS.
    3. Once you have selected all that apply, then click the large green check mark in the upper right of the drop-down box.
    4. In a separate browser window/tab, open the master spreadsheet we have created for this project.
    5. Find the tab within the spreadsheet for the generic medication you are researching.
    6. In the column for the classification (either “violent” or “delusional”) for which you just made your reaction selections, and for each of the years individually from 1992 through 2017, enter the total number of reactions for that year.
    7. At the bottom of the column, in one cell, enter the name of each reaction you included in the list of reactions, each one separated by a comma.
  9. Once you have filled in the two columns, please mail guy@gunfacts.info and inform him of the name of the medication you have just done. Once he sanity checks your work, and if you are willing, he will assign you another medication.