The drugs given to our kids to modify behavior should be stopped. Of course, the Socialists would rather blame the NRA.
Are Psychiatric Drugs Driving Our Kids to Kill?
Ken Hamblin
July 1, 1999
Like most other Americans, I've spent the last couple of months trying to make sense of all the howling about the dire influence of violence on television, savagery in movies and mayhem in video games on our children today.
Recently, however, I've come to wonder why the same crisismongers kicking up the fuss over these topics aren't asking hard questions about the so-called mental-health medication increasingly being dispensed to our kids.
T.J. Solomon, the high-school shooter in Conyers, Ga., was reportedly taking the drug Ritalin. Eric Harris, the ringleader of the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Col., had been prescribed the drug Luvox. And Kip Kinkel, the student in Springfield, Ore., who killed his parents and then went on a shooting rampage at his high school, was taking the psychiatric drugs Prozac and Ritalin.
There were many other possible factors in their cases, of course, but I couldn't help wondering if these drugs might have had some influence on their actions.
In an effort to educate myself, I invited Ann B. Tracy, author of Prozac: Panacea or Pandora? (Cassia Publications, 1999), to appear on my syndicated talk-radio show. Her book is the result of five years of research into the booming mental-health-medication industry and the pharmaceutical companies whose coffers it so plentifully fills.
My conversation with Tracy was indeed an eye opener. She directed me to a 1997 letter written to Time magazine by Candace B. Pert, a research professor at Washington's Georgetown University Medical Center.
"I am alarmed at the monster that Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Solomon Snyder and I created when we discovered the simple binding assay for drug receptors 25 years ago," Pert wrote. "Prozac and other antidepressant serotonin-receptor-active compounds may also cause cardiovascular problems in some susceptible people after long-term use, which has become common practice despite the lack of safety studies.
"The public is being misinformed about the precision of these selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors when the medical profession oversimplifies their action in the brain ..."
Intrigued, I decided to investigate further. A week later I talked with Dr. Peter R. Breggin, a psychiatrist who is the author of Talking Back to Ritalin (Common Courage Press, 1998) and the president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International. He shared his concern about the number of children on psychiatric drugs.
"Several million children are being treated with Ritalin and other stimulants on the grounds that they have attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder and suffer from inattention, hyperactivity or impulsivity," Breggin says in his book. "The stimulants include: Ritalin (methylphenidate), Dexedrine and DextroStat (dextroamphetamine or d-amphetamine), Adderall (d-amphetamine and amphetamine mixture), Desoxyn and Gradumet (methamphetamine), and Cylert (pemoline)."
"Except for Cylert," Breggin notes, "all of these drugs have nearly identical effects and side effects ... Ritalin and amphetamine frequently cause the very same problems they are supposed to treat _ inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity. A large percentage of children become robotic, lethargic, depressed or withdrawn on stimulants.
"Withdrawal from Ritalin can cause emotional suffering, including depression, exhaustion and suicide," he adds. "This can make children seem psychiatrically disturbed and lead mistakenly to increased doses of medication."
Breggin points out that today there are more than 909,000 children and adolescents between the ages of 6 and 18 receiving psychiatric antidepressant drugs in the United States alone.
As for Luvox, the antidepressant Eric Harris was taking, Breggin's report is intriguing _ and frightening.
"According to the manufacturer, Solvay, four percent of children and youth taking Luvox developed mania during short-term clinical trials," he says. "Mania is a psychosis which can produce bizarre, grandiose, highly elaborated destructive plans, including mass murder ..."
It seems hardly irrational to wonder if there was a link between these designer drugs and the violent, antisocial actions of the children taking them.
Did Luvox play a substantial role in the massacre at Columbine High School? Was Kinkel at least in part motivated to kill his parents and shoot up his school because he was on Prozac? Could his Ritalin prescription have been a significant factor in T.J. Solomon's rampage at his high school?
I'm no doctor, but these coincidences strike me as too glaring for the medical community to ignore.
It's no endorsement to say that we can understand the antisocial rationale that drives one kid in the ghetto or the barrio to murder another over turf conflicts, macho aggression or drug disputes. It's irrational, but at least it's comprehensible.
But many of us are hard-pressed to understand how violent video games, violent movies or firearms _ all of which have long been available to our children in one form or another _ can suddenly be responsible for so many white-bread suburban and country kids lashing out and massacring their parents and schoolmates.
But when a surprising number of these students turn out to have been administered psychiatric drugs with little regard for their known or unknown side effects ... well, it doesn't prove anything, but it certainly makes me want to learn more.
c.1999 Ken Hamblin
Posted for discussion and educational purposes only. Not for commercial use.
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