Thank you.
My name is Dave Bona. I tripped and stumbled and fell into a role nine years ago when I discovered I was poisoned by the anti-malaria drug mefloquine. In my search for answers I inadvertently became a point of contact for injured veterans looking for assistance and very quickly I realized there's a quite a large problem.
I was on social media and I was watching the suicides come across my feed again and again, and it was like, someone's got to do something about this. I started going on veteran Facebook groups, chat groups etc., and talking about my own journey and my own symptoms and stuff like that. Whenever I'd get veterans commenting on it, I would literally pounce on them and would end up creating a situation where I would get these guys on the phone and I would educate people on their injury and point them in the proper direction to receive help.
Here comes the hard part: I started having the families reach out to me. I had to develop a technique for dealing with these people because it was suicide and there was a lot of strong emotion involved. I developed a system where, when I got the information from the individual, I would track down someone this individual had deployed with, to find out if they had taken mefloquine and, more importantly, if they had been having adverse reactions to the drug.
Once I established that, I reached out to someone who had intimate contact with this individual in the last two weeks of their lives. Then I could see what their state was, their mental health state. With that information, I was able to draw conclusions on whether they were poisoned by mefloquine and if their suicide was attributable to mefloquine poisoning.
I'm not a doctor. I've lived with suicide. I know what CLP tastes like. I sat in back bunkers with the muzzle of a rifle in my mouth, clicking the safety off and taking up the slack on the trigger too many times to recall. I have attempted suicide three times. Each time I had someone step in to stop me. I'm very lucky to be here right now.
If you have any questions on mefloquine, I have all the answers. I went to all the conferences. I talked to the experts. I immersed myself in it.
Thank you very much for your time.