AMERICA: A NATION OF LEGAL DRUG ADDICTS

When it came to drugs, "just say no" used to be a parent's favourite slogan.
But not any more, says psychiatrist Peter R. Breggin in The Boston Sunday
Globe. Today, America is raising a nation of legal drug addicts.

"In my psychiatric practice, I see children six to ten years old who have
been put on four or five psychiatric medications at once," says Dr. Breggin.
This year, six million children across the USA -- over one tenth of the
schoolage population -- will be prescribed anti-depressants and stimulants.
"From Ritalin and Dexedrine to Prozac and Paxil, the drug epidemic among our
children comes increasingly from our prescription counters," he declares.

The situation is now so out of control that the International Narcotics
Control Board of the World Health Organisation has issued a warning against
the massive over-prescription of stimulants to American children, a country
that consumes 90 percent of the world's Ritalin -- a 'remedy' for so-called
Attention Deficit Disorder.

What type of children are drugged? Children who are sad, anxious, angry,
aggressive or just plain disobedient... even shy, dreamy children are being
drugged. In short, childhood itself has come to he seen as a disease.

But in a country that is supposed to value differences, such wholesale
drugging of children "reflects an extreme of enforced conformity. The child
is compelled to display a drug-induced, superficial social veneer."

By turning to pharmaceutical drugs as a quick-fix solution to their
children's more disappointing characteristics, many believe that parents are
bringing up a generation of people who have little sense of personal
responsibility. Instead of learning how to improve themselves and the world
they live in, children are being taught that they are somehow defective and
should rely on drugs to make them 'right'.