DRUGGING OF OUR KIDS CREATES A RITALIN NATION

The Food and Drug Administration issued new rules 10 days ago that require
drug companies to study more thoroughly the safety and effectiveness of
drugs for children. Staggering though it is to believe, many drugs
regularly prescribed to children have been tested only on adults. Even
their labels admit as much: "Safety and effectiveness in pediatric patients
have not been established." Nonetheless, these drugs are peddled to
children, while unwitting parents and society turn a blind eye to the
unknown and potentially disastrous long-term effects.

On the surface the FDA ruling is good news indeed. But it opens an avenue
for abuse. Dr. Peter Breggin, author of Talking Back to Ritalin and Talking
Back to Prozac, said, "FDA pediatric approval could provide an official
imprimatur that would give even more confidence to doctors to
indiscriminately drug children. It could become another marketing
strategy."

One way to prevent this is to demand that all studies - whether they show
adverse effects or benefits - be made available to the public and end the
practice of ceding to the drug companies proprietary rights to the
information. "The public might be shocked to learn," Breggin said, "that
the vast majority of studies done for the FDA approval of psychiatric drugs
such as Prozac show them to be of no value whatsoever. The companies are
allowed to pick out two often marginally or questionably successful studies
as `proof' that the drugs work."

Making all studies available is all the more urgent given the growing
evidence that the drug companies, by sponsoring research and offering
grants, trips and other perks, are contaminating the conclusions of the
research. Examples proliferate. The most recent involves three doctors
editorializing in the British Medical Journal that Prozac is not addictive
- - presumably the same way Big Tobacco-paid research assured us that
nicotine was not addictive. In this instance, the doctors had just returned
from an all-expenses-paid - by Prozac manufacturer Eli Lilly - trip to a
symposium in Phoenix.

The FDA decision coincides with a report issued by the National Institutes
of Health, which conceded that for the most widely medicated childhood
"condition" - attention deficit disorder - "there is no current, validated
diagnostic test."

This hasn't stopped prescriptions of Ritalin to children who've been given
a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder from jumping to 75
percent in 1996, up 20 percent since 1989. At the same time, the percentage
of those receiving psychotherapy dropped from 40 percent to 25 percent.
Such statistics highlight the crass, bottom-line approach of most health
care providers, who prefer relatively cheap drugs to costly therapy. But
they also speak to our lazy culture's inclination to medicate major social
problems rather than act on them.

This problem was summed up by Dr. Lawrence Diller, author of Running on
Ritalin: "Settling for Ritalin says we prefer to locate our children's
problems in their brains rather than in their lives." Diller described
three candidates for ADD diagnosis: 4-year-old Stevie, and his two younger
sisters, all of whom get dropped off for preschool at 7 a.m. by their dad
and are picked up at 5:30 p.m. by their mom "if she isn't running late."
Stevie is overly aggressive, and his parents, whose own marriage is
troubled, are desperate, demanding a fix: prescription drugs.

In most cases, parents get the short-term relief they're looking for from
prescription drugs, but as Breggin put it: "Behaviors are signals that
should be interpreted and understood, not suppressed."

The overprescribing of drugs has made possible the suppression of signals a
society needs to detect and address growing problems - in this case, the
failures of our managed care system; the pressures put on children by two
working parents, longer work hours and inadequate child care; and the
connection between legal and illegal drug abuse.

This last may be the least well known, but has the potential to become the
most dangerous. Dr. Nadine Lambert, a developmental psychologist at U.C.
Berkeley, published a paper in October with the chilling finding that
children on Ritalin are three times more likely to develop a taste for
cocaine. Meanwhile, the Drug Enforcement Administration reports increasing
Ritalin abuse among adolescents who sometimes crush it into a powder and
snort it - which can lead to heart failure.

When the government spends $16 billion a year on the drug war, and when
more than half of those in jail are nonviolent drug offenders, isn't it
time we connected the dots between prescription drugs and street drugs? How
many more prisons do we have to build to jail offenders whom, earlier in
life, we had drugged with abandon?

Checked-by: Joel W. Johnson