Drugging our kids

The NY Times reports:

Foster children are being prescribed cocktails of powerful antipsychosis drugs just as frequently as some of the most mentally disabled youngsters on Medicaid, a new study suggests.

The report, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, is the first to investigate how often youngsters in foster care are given two antipsychotic drugs at once, the authors said. The drugs include Risperdal, Seroquel and Zyprexa — among other so-called major tranquilizers — which were developed for schizophrenia but are now used as all-purpose drugs for almost any psychiatric symptoms.

“The kids in foster care may come from bad homes, but they do not have the sort of complex medical issues that those in the disabled population do,” said Susan dosReis, an associate professor in the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy and the lead author.

The implication, Dr. dosReis and other experts said: Doctors are treating foster children’s behavioral problems with the same powerful drugs given to people with schizophrenia and severe bipolar disorder. “We simply don’t have evidence to support this kind of use, especially in young children,” Dr. dosReis said.

Psychiatrists used to claim that mental illnesses like schizophrenia were caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, usually involving serotonin or oxytocin. They also claimed that these new anti-psychotic drugs corrected these imbalances. But researchers have never been able to confirm that, and now these pills are handed out to anyone with a complaint.

Drugging foster kids does not do them any good. It is just a way for the govt authorities to label them as damaged, treat them as subhuman, and pretend that they are being helped.

Meanwhile, other parents cannot get enough ADHD drugs. NPR radio reports:

When it's time to renew her son's prescriptions for medicine to treat his attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, Roxanne Ryan prepares for another wild goose chase.

The Philadelphia mother says she typically has to call around to 10 to 15 different pharmacies to find where the prescriptions can be filled. And when 10-year-old Sergey doesn't get his medication, he's a bundle of uncontained energy. ...

Whatever the root causes, for people like Roxanne Ryan in Philadelphia, it doesn't do much good to know there's plenty of medicine out there – somewhere. If she can't get what Sergey needs, she'll continue to give him the medication prescribed for her. (She was diagnosed with ADHD after he was – a not-uncommon story.)

"It's sacrificing so that my son can have," she says. "Every parent does that."

You might wonder why the drug industry would make all the drugs that they can sell. I think that the key is that ADHD drugs are addictive, and rationing drugs to addicted customers makes them want the drugs all the more.

There are no studies saying that the ADHD drugs work any better than a cup of coffee. This Philadelphia mom has the panic of a drug addict. Otherwise, she would just get a cup of coffee and not worry about it. As one ADD journalist explains:

The best of the addiction-based business models are "addiction-proof" addictive drug, and the Adderall story is at its core the saga of a nearly century-long quest for this unattainable ideal. Amphetamine salt -— Adderall’s active ingredient -— has been the subject of heady dispute within the medical profession since the drug company Smith, Kline and French began peddling the stuff in 1935, but for decades just about the only thing medical community generally agreed about was that it was not addictive. The SKF sales department did, however, have a term for the loyalty it engendered among consumers: “stick.” ...

Today the $4 billion ADD drug industry is about ten times its 1996 size, and Adderall is the reigning market leader.

I think that this is evil. More and more, I think that there is a systematic effort in our society to break down the family. To accomplish this, they do everything they can to put kids under the control of judges, psychiatrists, social workers, and drugs. It used to be that when a mom had a 10-year-old boy who is "a bundle of uncontained energy", the dad would teach him to play football or work on the farm to burn up that energy and make a man out of him. But now our society has convinced this mom to kick out her husband, drug the boy, and let him get fat and lazy. She even brags about what a good self-sacrificing parent she is, because she shares her amphetamines with him.

I will post a letter this week that details how the Santa Cruz court has forced unnecessary and harmful drugs on a boy, in an attempt to control him. Some of you will probably say that it a story of incompetent but well-meaning do-gooders. I don't buy it. They are evil, and they have a purpose.