GENERATION OF KIDS LOST IN PRESCHOOL WASTELAND

At a White House meeting Monday with health and education officials,
Hillary Rodham Clinton tapped into a growing national concern and outlined
proposals for warning labels and a wide-ranging study on the use of
Ritalin. "Some of these young people," she said, "have problems that are
symptoms of nothing more than childhood or adolescence." This is good news
indeed, coming at a time when those promoting the legal drugging of
America's children score fresh triumphs every day.

A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association
found a dramatic increase in the number of 2- to 4-year-olds on Prozac,
Ritalin and other mood-altering drugs. But the same legislators who talk
tough about their commitment to fight illegal drugs seem oblivious to the
dangers of pushing powerful prescription drugs on preschoolers. Even though
Prozac hasn't been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for
children under 18, and methylphenidate--the generic name for
Ritalin--carries a warning against its use by children younger than 6,
doctors everywhere are prescribing these drugs to children.

In a particularly stunning development, the drug industry has now even
enlisted the cuddly characters from Sesame Street as unwitting but no doubt
highly effective soldiers in the fight for our children's hearts and minds.
By purchasing 15-second "enhanced underwriter acknowledgments"--PBS-speak
for commercials--Pfizer has linked its antibiotic Zithromax with Elmo, Big
Bird and Oscar the Grouch. How long before Eli Lilly decides to get in on
the act and change Sesame Street's traditional sign-off: "Today's show was
brought to you by the letter `P,' which stands for Prozac, and the number
`2,' which is how many of the little green pills you should take each
morning to make sure you have another `sunny day, chasing the clouds away!' "

And if you think that time never will come, you probably also thought that
there never would come a time when the chairman of the House's health
subcommittee, engaged in drafting legislation affecting prescription-drug
costs, would be holding a $2,000-per-person fund-raiser hosted by Eli
Lilly, Johnson & Johnson and Bristol-Myers. But that's precisely what Rep.
Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) did just last week--as well, of course, as failing
to exercise any oversight while the drug industry pushes its chemical
crutches to our nation's children.

It was the UN-sponsored International Narcotics Control Board that recently
lambasted the United States for overprescribing stimulants such as
Ritalin--pointing out that America consumes more than 90 percent of all the
methylphenidate taken worldwide.

The official psychiatric diagnostic manual describes as symptoms of
attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder "squirms in seat," "interrupts or
intrudes on others" and "is often on the go." Sounds a lot like childhood,
a condition that--when left untreated--tends to cure itself over time. As
Dr. Julie Magno Zito, the lead author of the JAMA study, put it: "It is not
really clear that children this young could meet the diagnostic criteria
for either attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or depression."

The latest battlefront is our nation's schools, where teachers and
administrators increasingly demand that parents of rambunctious children
either put them on drugs or face expulsion. Dr. Peter Breggin, author of
Reclaiming Our Children, says that his practice has been "flooded" with
families at the end of their rope over these demands.

One of Breggin's patients is Michael Weathers, a fourth-grader at the Alden
Place Elementary School in Millbrook, N.Y., who was given a succession of
psychiatric drugs, including Ritalin and Paxil, starting in the second
grade. When his parents, disturbed by the manic side effects, took him off
the drugs, the school reported them to Child Protective Services, charging
them with, among other thing, medical neglect.

Despite the fact that the number of children on Ritalin has skyrocketed
from 1 million in 1990 to 4 million today, and that we now have more than a
million children on Prozac, there are no signs of deceleration.

Perversely, the only good news on the legal drug front, other than the
first lady's warning, stems from a drug-fueled crime spree that culminated
in a bank robbery: The robber was acquitted by a Connecticut judge because
he was under the influence of Prozac when he committed the crime. This is
the first time the so-called "Prozac defense" has worked, after at least 77
previous attempts in courtrooms across the country. It's also the first
legal opening for what now must become an ongoing investigation into the
connection between outbreaks of violence and drugs such as Prozac and
Luvox--the meds of choice for school shooters Kip Kinkel and Eric Harris.

So is there any chance that members of the FDA Oversight Committee--which
should be renamed the FDA Blind-Eye Committee--will wake up from their
donor-induced stupor? It would certainly be nice if they did it before our
kids are turned into a troop of drugged-out zombies, while we grown-ups
fight a $40 billion-a-year drug war in their name.