HILLARY AWAKENS TO CHILD DRUG DANGERS

It's not that Hillary Clinton was out of line when she raised concerns
Monday at the White House about the increasing use of psychotropic
drugs such as Ritalin and Prozac by children as young as two years
old. That concern is certainly warranted. It's just that it's a little
surprising coming from Mrs. Clinton.

It was only last June, after all, that Mrs. Clinton, along with Vice
President Al Gore's wife Tipper, hosted a highly publicized conference
on mental health. That conference, as Sally Zinman, director of the
California Network of Mental Health Clients, put it, seemed like "an
infomercial for drugs. There was absolutely no mention of the
potential risks."

At the June 1999 conference Mrs. Clinton introduced Dr. Harold
Koplewicz of New York University's Child Studies Center and stood by
beaming as he traced all mental and emotional problems to brain
biochemistry.

Dr. Koplewicz derided explanations like "inadequate parenting and bad
childhood traumas" as an "antiquated way of thinking" about depression
and other childhood problems. He blamed school violence on untreated
mental problems and suggested that if anything too few young children
were being treated with psychiatric drugs. Better living through chemistry.

Nobody at the conference was so impolite as to point out that three of
the recent school shooters had been treated with psychiatric drugs.

Peter R. Breggin, M.D., a psychiatrist and author in Bethesda, Md.,
told us this week that he thinks Mrs. Clinton's remarkable turnaround
was little more than "saving face, covering her tracks and engaging in
political damage control."

Dr. Breggin (www.breggin.com), author of "Talking Back to Prozac,"
"Talking Back to Ritalin" and the just-released "Reclaiming Our
Children," is a long-time critic of the use of powerful psychotropic
drugs on children. He believes that a recent study and editorial in
JAMA, the American Medical Association journal, showing that use of
psychotropic drugs by children aged two to four had tripled was the
factor that had gotten Mrs. Clinton's attention.

Dr. Joseph T. Coyle of the Harvard Medical School wrote in JAMA:
"Given that there is no empirical evidence to support psychotropic
drug treatment in very young children and that there are valid
concerns that such treatment could have deleterious effects on the
developing brain, the reasons for these troubling changes in practice
need to be identified."

One of the reasons, of course, is that the government and many school
systems have been cheer-leaders for using behavior-altering drugs on
children.

Dr. Breggin argues, for example, that Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity
Disorder is far from a scientifically established biological disorder
at all, but, as he put it to us Tuesday, "a list of behaviors that
teachers would like to expunge from their classrooms, like talking out
of turn and not sitting still. These stimulant drugs crush the
vitality and the libertarian spirit of young children and that is why
they are popular. But we know enough from animal research and clinical
studies to be confident that it is scientifically unsound to
experiment with psychoactive agents on small children."

He notes that Mrs. Clinton did not criticize the widespread medicating
of school-age children, but expressed concern only about medicating
the very young.

Mrs. Clinton, for whatever reason, has identified and publicized a
phenomenon that deserves attention and concern as the finer
distinctions are made regarding in what circumstances and at what age
these types of drugs might have some use.

But she hasn't come close to getting to the bottom of the matter - or
even urging action that would begin the process.

Posted By Allan Wilkinson