Drugging Babies
It is well known that many of the recent high school student killers were being prescribed mind-altering psychiatric drugs. T.J. Solomon, the 15-year-old from Conyers, Ga., who shot six classmates in May 1999, was on Ritalin; Eric Harris, 18, one of the two Columbine killers, was being prescribed the anti-depressant Luvox; and Kip Kinkel, the 15-year-old from Springfield, Ore., who killed both his parents and two schoolmates, and wounded 20 other students in May 1998, was taking Prozac, one of the most widely prescribed drugs.
Of more than 6 million children under 18 in America who have been prescribed Ritalin, Luvox, Prozac, Paxil, and other anti-depressants and psychiatric drugs, many have committed violent acts, even killings. Many others are walking time-bombs. U.S. News & World Report, March 6, 2000, documented some lesser known cases:
• In California, 16-year-old Jared Viktor was convicted of murder for stabbing his grandmother 61 times. Ten days earlier, Jared had been prescribed the anti-depressant Paxil, for pre-existing problems.
• In Kansas, 13-year-old Matt Miller committed suicide (he was found hanging in his closet) after taking the anti-depressant Zoloft for a week. The Miller family has sued Pfizer, the manufacturer of Zoloft.
Even more horrible, increasing numbers of infants, toddlers, and pre-school children are being zombified with psychiatric drugs produced for adults, before they can even learn to talk, let alone read.
According to an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Feb. 23, 2000 (“Trends in the Prescribing of Psychotropic Medications to Pre-Schoolers”), poor children, especially black children, are prescribed Ritalin (methylphenidate) at younger and younger ages, with the number of prescriptions in two study groups having increased more than 300 percent during 1991-1995.
The anti-depressant Prozac is just as abused; the article says that a psychiatric newsletter, citing marketing data compiled by the Food and Drug Administration in 1994, reported some 3,000 prescriptions for fluoxetine hydrochloride (the generic name for Prozac) written for children younger than one year-old!
The findings, written by a group of doctors from the University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, and the Center for Health Research at Kaiser Permanente, in Portland, Ore., were presented in May 1999, at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Washington, D.C. But the dangerous practices haven’t stopped.
The team studied ambulatory care prescription records from 1991 to 1995 from two Medicaid programs (a Midwest state and a Mid-Atlantic state), and from one HMO in the Northwest. Records were checked for enrollees between two and four years old during those years.
The results should shock the nation: In all three programs, psychotropic medications prescribed for pre-schoolers increased dramatically. The use of methylphenidate increased in all three sites: 3-fold for the Midwest database, 1.7-fold for the Mid-Atlantic group, and 3.1-fold at the HMO. These records involved hundreds of thousands of patients—more than 158,000 enrolled in the Midwestern state, 54,237 in the Mid-Atlantic state, and 19,322 at the HMO.
One noticeable pattern is the prevalence of poor children. The Medicaid youth were almost entirely eligible under Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC, the former federal welfare program), and, within the Medicaid groups, “non-whites were over-represented,” i.e., a greater number than in the general population.
There is no question that the poorest children are being abused. The article says that in 1998, “Pediatric researchers noted that 57 percent of 223 Michigan Medicaid enrollees aged younger than 4 years with a diagnosis of ADHD [Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder] received at least one psychotropic medication to treat this condition.” Methylphenidate was one of the two most prescribed.
These results show a pattern of premeditated medical abuse. At a March 3 press conference, Sen. Chris Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, addressed the concerns posed by the JAMA article. He showed the warnings printed with every bottle of Ritalin. In large type, one says: “Warning: Ritalin should not be used in children under 6 years, since safety and efficacy in this age group have not been established.” A second warning says: “Precautions: long-term effects of Ritalin in children have not been well-established.” Yet, because these drugs have been approved for general use, there is no prohibition against giving them to children. |
