[center][b][size=6]Hyper-Drugging of Active Kids [/b][/size=6][/center]
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State legislatures are beginning to take action to rein in the widespread practice of drugging hyperactive children to control their undesirable behavior in the classroom.[/b][/center]
As the nation’s schoolchildren frolicked in the summer sun, lawmakers in the Nutmeg State spent the break tackling educational reform. The Connecticut General Assembly unanimously voted to prohibit teachers and other school officials, including counselors and psychologists, from recommending psychotropic drugs for any child.
Chief sponsor of this reform, state Rep. Lenny Winkler, tells Insight, “I value the teachers in Connecticut and I think they do a wonderful job, but medical diagnoses should not be in the hands of teachers.” Specifically, the new law calls for local and regional school boards to adopt and implement policies “prohibiting any school personnel from recommending the use of psychotropic drugs,” and it also requires that “if school personnel perceive that a child may have a behavioral or psychological problem, a letter shall be sent to the parent or person having control of the child recommending that an appropriate medical or behavioral evaluation be conducted by a licensed physician.”
As Winkler sees it, “We’re trying to do what is best for our kids. There are just too many far-reaching effects of these drugs, and we really need to do something about them.” When not serving in the General Assembly, Winkler is an emergency-room nurse and personally has seen consequences of the increased prescription of psychotropic drugs. “When the kids come into the emergency room, we have to ask the parents if their children are on any of these drugs. I’ve seen more and more kids on them, and it bothers me to no end. I didn’t know what was going on.”
It is estimated that between 6 million and 8 million children have been prescribed Ritalin to treat the still scientifically unproved “mental illness” called attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This widespread doping in turn has increased concern that school-age children are being drugged to control their behavior.
Fred Baughman, a child neurologist, researcher and staunch critic of the ADHD diagnosis, tells Insight, “It is my duty as a doctor to know whether patients have a disease and whether previously rendered diagnoses, such as ADHD, are proven diseases. I have been unable to validate or demonstrate a disease or objective physical abnormality in children said to have ADHD. Finding no objective physical abnormality, including a chemical one, means they have no disease; they are physically, medically and neurologically normal.”
While Baughman applauds the steps that lawmakers are beginning to take to rein in prescription of psychotropic drugs to control schoolchildren, he is not leaving it at that. “It would be a simple affair,” explains Baughman, “to subpoena and swear in the experts, such as the surgeon general and the heads of the National Institute of Mental Health and the American Psychiatric Association, and put the ‘disease’ versus ‘no disease’ question to them regarding ADHD, or any or all of ‘biological’ psychiatry’s alleged diseases.”
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