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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (15889)	3/27/2000 12:19:00 PM
From: DMaA	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

If SHE does anything right it's an accidental by-product of her single minded eternal grubbing for power: March 27, 2000 ADD a Campaign Issue Hey, we thought mental health was Tipper Gore's turf. Now all of a sudden Hillary Clinton has decided her candidacy needs a piece of this action. And so this past week, as the White House announced plans to reduce the number of kids gobbling Ritalin at school, the First Lady scrambled to claim as her own the kids/mental health issue that has been Mrs. Gore's big thing. The issue got cranked into politics a few weeks ago when the Journal of the American Medical Association released a study saying that the number of kids toting prescriptions for Ritalin, Prozac and other such pharmaceuticals is way up. The White House promptly assembled a gaggle of psychologists, social workers and pediatricians and annouced plans to enlist the DEA, the FDA and the NIMH. Apparently it will take a village of acronyms to solve the problem. There's little doubt, with seven-fold increases over the past decade, that Ritalin is being overprescribed. The drug, which helps concentration, has become a sort of cure-all for fidgety children. About 10% of the small male population is currently under the influence. And with some schools hiring extra nurses just to go around handing out the little green pills, there is some cause for concern. The question is whether a slew of new regulations and oversight will help a problem that science has already begun to address. The problem with Attention Deficit Disorder, the condition for which Ritalin is most frequently prescribed to children, is that there has never been a clear test to determine who has the condition. Rather, a questionnaire for parents of potentially ADD children asks whether the child is "easily distracted," "does not pay close attention to details or makes careless mistakes" or "fidgets with hands or feet or squirms in seat." In the past year, though, scientists have identified the actual brain disorder that causes it, an overproduction of dopamine. A small biotech firm, called Boston Life Sciences, has created an agent that will allow doctors to pick up the chemical on a brain scan. Soon enough, doctors will be able to weed out kids with a genuinely malfunctioning brain from those who are just chronically naughty. All this would seem to be an argument not for throwing yet more bureaucrats at the subject but for taking a hard look at some of the social issues driving improper Ritalin use. With a parenting culture in the '90s that spawned an army of latch-key kids and a comfort level with pill popping among baby-boomer parents not present in previous generations, there's plenty of explanations for the tendency to over-prescribe. Add the tendency of suburban parents to plot preschoolers' college educations, and consider that an ADD diagnosis will qualify kids for untimed SATs. By now, though, most parents and doctors are well along in having second thoughts about their excessive reliance on the drug. Mrs. Clinton wouldn't be climbing aboard unless there was already a bandwagon. In the end, Hillary and the liberals want photo-ops for putting out a fire that they started. According to the National Center for Policy Analysis, in the early 1990s the federal government began a program to give as much as $450 a month to low-income families with an ADD-diagnosed child. Also as part of the Special Education Law in 1991, the Department of Education offered schools extra money for each kid diagnosed with ADD. Guess what -- financial incentives, no matter how perverse their product, work very efficiently: Since the law was passed, the number of diagnoses has been shooting up 21% a year. And of course it was Tipper Gore and Surgeon General Satcher who created the sense of an epidemic when they announced last year that 21% of kids have some sort of mental disorder. While all this makes good sport for Hillary, the unnecessary politicization of our evolving understanding of the disorder and its treatment is bad news for the kids who actually have ADD. In the past year, partisan agendas have polarized the issue, turning ADD into either an epidemic affliction or a myth created by drug company executives for profit. Mrs. Clinton is counting on the issue to get her some traction with New York's women. Polls show her running behind Mayor Giuliani with this demographic as with almost every other. But appointing the First Lady and her minions to demagogue as guardians of "our children" will only complicate an issue that seems certain to take care of itself. interactive2.wsj.com