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Section/ADHD
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Doping and Addicting Children
“In its recent infatuation with symptomatic, push-button remedies, psychiatry has lost its way not only intellectually but spiritually and morally. Even when it is not actually doing damage to the people it is supposed to help, ... it is encouraging among doctors and patients alike the fraudulent and dangerous fantasy that life’s every passing ‘symptom’ can be clinically diagnosed and, once diagnosed, alleviated if not eliminated by pharmacological intervention. This idea is as false to reality, and ultimately to human hopes.…”
“In its recent infatuation with symptomatic, push-button remedies, psychiatry has lost its way not only intellectually but spiritually and morally. Even when it is not actually doing damage to the people it is supposed to help, ... it is encouraging among doctors and patients alike the fraudulent and dangerous fantasy that life’s every passing ‘symptom’ can be clinically diagnosed and, once diagnosed, alleviated if not eliminated by pharmacological intervention. This idea is as false to reality, and ultimately to human hopes.…”
Paul R. McHugh
Professor of Psychiatry
John Hopkins University
School of Medicine |
The Pompidou Group report states, “There is substantial evidence of safety and efficacy in children and adolescents of some psychostimulants, at least over a two-year period of time.”
However, prescribing medical treatment in the absence of medical disease, but with the intent of sedation, restraint and behaviour control is not proper medical practice. The “doping” of our children with drugs that are similar to cocaine is legalized drug pushing.
Internationally, methylphenidate is viewed as having a very high potential for abuse, is structurally and pharmacologically related to the amphetamines, and is listed in Schedule II of the Psychotropic Convention.
Buitelaar and Bergsma claimed in The Pompidou Group report, “Treatment with psychostimulants has been researched rather well. Psychostimulants resemble amphetamines, and fall under the heading of licensed drugs. The medication is addictive for animals, but surprisingly, not for children with ADHD when prescribed and used appropriately.”
Additionally, the Pompidou Report says that “preliminary evidence indicates that stimulant treatment of ADHD/HKD patients may lower their risk of subsequent drug abuse….”
There is substantial evidence to the contrary:
- Methylphenidate and other stimulants are potentially addictive.
- In 1996, the DEA reported that scientific literature spanning 30 years “has consistently found that methylphenidate shares the same abuse liability as amphetamine, methamphetamine and cocaine.”
- In an analysis of a community-based group of adults born in the 1960s, the DEA concluded: “Preliminary data indicated the medicated ADHD group had a higher lifetime frequency of cocaine use and a higher percentage that used cocaine more than 40 times…this preliminary data suggest that stimulant treatment of ADHD in childhood may be a risk factor for cocaine abuse in adults.”
- A 1998 study of California adolescents diagnosed with ADHD found that, as adults, those treated with Ritalin were three times more likely to use cocaine.
- In August 2001, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that methylphenidate acts much like cocaine. Injected as a liquid, it sends a jolt that “addicts like very much,” said Nora Volkow, M.D., psychiatrist and imaging expert at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY. The drug is chemically similar to cocaine, the study says. The study also admits that although psychiatrists have used this drug to treat ADHD for 40 years, they and pharmacologists have never known how or why it worked.58
- In November 2001, researchers at the State University of New York at Buffalo found that contrary to current belief that methylphenidate has only short-term effects, the drug may effect brain function after a dose has worn off. Researchers fed sweetened milk containing methylphenidate to one group of rats and sweetened milk only to a second group. After 90 minutes, the researchers examined the brains of the animals. “We saw a lot of cells that were making this protein, c-fos, in the straitum and in the cortex,” said Joan Baizer, an Associate Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at the State University of New York in Buffalo. “The same thing had been seen with amphetamine and cocaine in similar parts of the brain.”
In his book, The Brain has a Mind, Richard Restak says such drugs can lead users to conclude that “if the world isn’t behaving as you believe that it should, and you feel good while taking your own special drug, then say no to the world rather than to the drug.”60
Essentially, we are allowing legal drug pushing on thousands of children, potentially creating drug addicts.
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Child Drugging