THE VIEW FROM HERE:
IN TROUBLE IF YOU DON'T SAY "YES" TO DRUGS

I can't get the case of the Carroll family of West Berne off my mind.
That's the family the parents of which stand accused of child neglect
partly for taking their 7-year-old son off Ritalin for two weeks to
see how he would get along.

"Say YES to drugs - or else!" is the pretty clear message of the Berne
Elementary School (which filed the complaint), the Albany County
Department of Social Services (which is prosecuting it), and Albany
County Family Court (which ordered the parents to "meet the medical
requirements" of the boy while deciding what further action to take.)

Say YES, or else we're going to put you under "supervision,"
big-brother-style, or even take your kid away from you and put him in
foster care for up to a year - which are two of the options that
Family Court Judge Gerard E. Maney has before him.

The superintendent of the Berne-Knox-Westerlo Central School District,
Steve Schrade, who became superintendent after the complaint was filed
last year, assures me he would not have supported it. He thinks it
quite reasonable for parents to take a kid off a prescribed
psychotropic drug like Ritalin, which is an amphetamine, for a short
time, under supervision, to see how the kid fares. But what's done is
done, and the matter is not in his hands but in the hands of
caseworkers and the Family Court judge regardless of what he thinks.

"I think it should be our choice," says Jill Carroll, the mother, "I
really do." But too bad for her.

Of course Jill and her husband, Mike, could hire a lawyer to fight
this for them, a lawyer who might study the literature on Ritalin and
the alleged disorder it is supposed to treat - Attention
Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder - and might recruit expert witnesses to
debunk the disorder and decry the use of mind-altering drugs for
children - but that would take a lot of money, and they don't have a
lot of money, or a whole lot of sophistication for that matter. Jill
is endeavoring to get a General Equivalency Diploma and Mike is
employed part-time as a gardener.

So instead of private lawyers they have two public defenders, one for
each of them, assigned by the court. I caught up with one of those
worthies the other day in a chaotic courthouse corridor, but he could
spare little time to talk to me because he had 15 cases on his platter
that day - just to give you an idea of the amount of effort a public
defender can apply to any one case.

Whether he knows anything about Ritalin or anything about Attention
Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, I could not determine.

There is certainly plenty of literature casting doubt on the wisdom of
giving a drug like Ritalin to children and also casting doubt on the
reality of the supposed disorder, if anyone wants to pursue it.

There's "Talking Back to Ritalin," by Peter R. Breggin, M.D.; there's
"The Myth of the A.D.D. Child," by Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D.; there's
"Immunize Your Child Against ADD," by Fred A. Braughman, M.D.; there's
"The Myth of the Hyperactive Child and Other Means of Child Control,"
by Peter Schrag and Diane Divoky; there's "No More Ritalin," by Mary
Ann Block M.D.

There's even a national organization, Parents Against Ritalin, based
in Oklahoma.

So it's not as if skepticism about these matters is anything
outlandish. It's part of what's becoming a national debate.

Of course I realize there is a tremendous amount of pressure from the
other side - from teachers who don't want to deal with unruly kids,
from parents who desire their kids to be perfect, and from doctors who
diagnose and prescribe what's expected of them. Not to mention from
the pharmaceutical industry, which subsidizes a national support
group. (Ritalin and its generic equivalents is close to a
billion-dollar industry, and is growing at the rate of 30 percent a
year.)

But for a couple of parents to wind up in Family Court, under threat
of having their kid taken away from them, partly on the grounds of
withholding this highly controversial speed-like drug from their kid
surpasses anything I have heard so far.

It makes me wonder if Berne school officials and Albany County social
workers have gone utterly bonkers.