A DOSE OF REALITY

The Truth About North America's Greatest Drug Problem.

Ritalin.

On any given day in North America, almost five million kids will take
a powerful psychostimulant drug. The geographical caveat is important:
more kids in North America are diagnosed with attention deficit
disorder (ADD) and given drugs like Ritalin to "help" them behave than
in the rest of the world combined.

In fact, the US and Canada account for a startling 95 percent of
worldwide Ritalin consumption.

In the midst of this drug epidemic, April 2001 appeared to signal a
backlash. Two television magazines, PBS's Frontline and A&E's
Investigative Reports, pondered the massive increase in use, as did a
five-part series in Canada's National Post newspaper.

Still, of all the critical reports in recent months, none has come any
closer to facing the hard facts about Ritalin than have the hundreds
that came before.

Fact one: While medical "experts" and the media persistently deny it,
developmental studies have now established that certain differences in
caregiving and family structure cause some children to become
impulsive and hyperactive. In a recent example, a ten-year, federally
funded study in the US, reported at the April meeting of the Society
for Research in Child Development, found that the more time children
spent in daycare the more unmanageable they became.

Kids who spent more than 30 hours a week in daycare scored
significantly higher on such things as "explosive behavior," "talking
too much, " " argues a lot, " and " demands a lot of attention" - the
very behaviors that so often lead to stimulant treatment.

Fact two: Ritalin is little more than coke for kids. "Cocaine, which
is one of the most reinforcing and addictive of the abused drugs, has
pharmacological actions that are very similar to those of
methylphenidate [Ritalin], which is the most commonly prescribed
psychotropic medication for children in the United States." This
conclusion, reported by Nora Volkow and colleagues at Brookhaven
National Laboratory, appeared in the Archives of General Psychiatry in
1995. A follow-up study, published in the American journal of
Psychiatry in 1998, found that the pharmacological actions produced by
oral, therapeutic doses of Ritalin were comparable to those produced
by recreational doses of intranasal cocaine.

Researchers are quick to point out that children prescribed Ritalin do
not (usually) snort or inject it, which alters the drug-taking
experience. But do we really believe parents would give their kids
cocaine, even if it was only in pill form?

Fact three: Ideology is driving the science.

Fighting the drug war, researchers like Volkow have demonstrated that
continued use of cocaine and other stimulants causes brain changes.

Yet never have these researchers investigated whether chronic
stimulant use might produce the same effects in kids. Meanwhile, other
researchers have pointed to subtle differences in certain areas of the
brain to suggest that ADD is a biological disease a claim repeated in
the recent Frontline episode.

The truth is that all these studies have looked only at hyperactive
individuals who have been taking stimulants for years.

At least one study, published in Psychiatry Research in 1986, was
honest in its findings: "since all of the [ADD] patient had been
treated with stimulants, cortical atrophy [i.e., brain deterioration]
may be a long-term adverse effect of this treatment."

Fact four: The US Drug Enforcement Administration has long known that
massive amounts of Ritalin are being diverted by adolescents and
adults into recreational use, where it's often crushed up and snorted,
or even injected. The DEA reported that Ritalin misuse in high schools
increased from three to 16 percent from 1992 to 1995. Similarly, it
found that while children between the ages of ten and 14 were involved
in about 25 emergencyroom visits connected with Ritalin misuse in 199
1, this number had jumped to 1,725 by 1998.

Fact five: Stimulants are no cure. Perhaps all this hypocrisy could be
excused if stimulant "treatment" somehow worked, but it doesn't --- at
least not for the children themselves. Parents have been encouraged to
believe that pharmacological control will boost their child's learning
and social skills, but this rarely happens.

Dozens of objective studies have assessed the long-term effectiveness
of stimulants on children's academic performance, social development
and self control.

None has shown them to be effective for anything but controlling kids'
behavior an effect that vanishes once the drug wears off. Such studies
rarely make the headlines, however. Instead, we hear about recent
research from the US - "the MTA study" - that relied heavily on
subjective reports from teachers and parents while ignoring its own
objective findings, which showed little promise for drug treatment.

Reporting on this research, the media, too, has found a cure where
there isn't one.

So where does the cure lie? It lies in prevention. This means getting
back to basics as a culture, with parents who have and take the time
to truly matter in the lives of children.