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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Win Smith who wrote (9175)	3/20/2001 11:46:10 AM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

Brain chemistry is interesting. It may not matter what comes first "the chicken" or "the egg". The fact is that it is hard to know if destructive behavior starts the brain imbalance or the brain imbalance starts the destructive behavior. All that one needs sometimes is to break the cycle which is why chemistry is more effective than therapy. I think it is interesting about X's observations with Kid Zone and this plays right into this theme. I find that many of the kids my our children want to play with are unruly, disrespectful, arrogant, precocious and have a variety of other social conditions that were much rarer when I was a child. I've heard kids say things to adults that NOBODY in my neighborhood would have said to an adult. I think it may be a bit of the "Lord of the Flies" going on here. They are largely unsupervised and when their overstressed parents get home, they don't want to spend the few hours they do have with them in confrontation. JMO and just a theory.

To: Win Smith who wrote (9175)	3/20/2001 5:27:31 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 82486

I can't imagine any American school dispensing any prescription drug at all, much less a Schedule 2 drug, without fully informed parental consent, and without the parent actually getting the drug themselves and delivering it with proper permission forms to the school. In all the schools I have experience with, they won't even give Tylenol without permission. reason.com "In July a family court judge in Albany County, New York, ordered Michael and Jill Carroll to continue feeding Ritalin, a popular drug used to treat hyperactivity and other juvenile behavior problems, to their son Kyle. The Carrolls had taken Kyle off the drug because they were unhappy with its effects. They ended up in court after a school counselor reported them to the local child protective services agency for neglect. "Ritalin solved the problem for the school," says Jill Carroll, "but the side effects were too much. Kyle hardly slept or ate. After a while he started complaining of—this was kind of weird —these pains. There was something wrong with his legs, he’d say: He had ‘wigglies’ in his leg. Every time he drank water, he said, it felt like it was ‘trickling’ from his brain." Kyle’s insomnia and loss of appetite are not uncommon among kids on Ritalin. Other reported side effects include heart palpitations, nausea, anxiety, and psychoses. And the side effects can often lead to a roller coaster of psychoactive medications as new drugs are prescribed to cope with them. Government agents seem quick to drug kids. The Los Angeles Times ran a story in 1998 looking at kids in foster care and other forms of government supervision in California. Reporter Tracy Weber found that "children under state protection in California group and foster homes are being drugged with potent, dangerous psychiatric medications, at times just to keep them obedient and docile for their overburdened caretakers." Ritalin, like AZT, is embroiled in scientific and cultural controversy, with a dominant medical model being combated by an increasingly vocal minority of doctors who point out Ritalin’s chemical and functional similarity to cocaine and amphetamine (normally considered bad for kids). Skeptics also note that the disease for which it is allegedly a cure, "attention deficit hyperactivity disorder," is better recognized as a set of behaviors that teachers find irritating, with no objectively verifiable chemical or organic cause. Physicians and psychologists who publicly oppose dosing kids with Ritalin, such as Peter Breggin, Fred Baughman, and Richard De Grandpre, all report hearing from many distraught parents who, like the Carrolls, are upset about what the drug does to their children. Such parents commonly report implied pressure from schools to drug their child lest the kid be booted from school. Thus, schools can leverage coercive power without openly bringing in child protective services or the courts. Facing a court order to continue drugging their son, the Carrolls found another pediatrician, who decided Kyle didn’t need Ritalin after all. Since it was a doctor’s decision and not theirs, this satisfied the court order (and shed some light on the scientific value of Ritalin diagnoses). Kyle is now off Ritalin, and is in a special education school instead of the traditional public one that called in the cops. He’s doing fine, says his mother. Still, the state insists it must drop in from time to time. "The only thing they do is still come out and make sure everything is all right," she tells me. "Every other week, they come in and say, ‘Hi, Kyle.’ Kyle says ‘hi,’ and they walk away." So the schools do get ritalin prescribed for the student without the parents consent but only by getting a court order. Your right that it usually requires parental consent, but the parents are told that the child will be removed from the school if the parents don't agree to have the child recieve ritalin. Tim

To: Win Smith who wrote (9175)	3/20/2001 5:27:57 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

I can't imagine any American school dispensing any prescription drug at all, much less a Schedule 2 drug, without fully informed parental consent, and without the parent actually getting the drug themselves and delivering it with proper permission forms to the school. In all the schools I have experience with, they won't even give Tylenol without permission. reason.com _______ "In July a family court judge in Albany County, New York, ordered Michael and Jill Carroll to continue feeding Ritalin, a popular drug used to treat hyperactivity and other juvenile behavior problems, to their son Kyle. The Carrolls had taken Kyle off the drug because they were unhappy with its effects. They ended up in court after a school counselor reported them to the local child protective services agency for neglect. "Ritalin solved the problem for the school," says Jill Carroll, "but the side effects were too much. Kyle hardly slept or ate. After a while he started complaining of—this was kind of weird —these pains. There was something wrong with his legs, he’d say: He had ‘wigglies’ in his leg. Every time he drank water, he said, it felt like it was ‘trickling’ from his brain." Kyle’s insomnia and loss of appetite are not uncommon among kids on Ritalin. Other reported side effects include heart palpitations, nausea, anxiety, and psychoses. And the side effects can often lead to a roller coaster of psychoactive medications as new drugs are prescribed to cope with them. Government agents seem quick to drug kids. The Los Angeles Times ran a story in 1998 looking at kids in foster care and other forms of government supervision in California. Reporter Tracy Weber found that "children under state protection in California group and foster homes are being drugged with potent, dangerous psychiatric medications, at times just to keep them obedient and docile for their overburdened caretakers." Ritalin, like AZT, is embroiled in scientific and cultural controversy, with a dominant medical model being combated by an increasingly vocal minority of doctors who point out Ritalin’s chemical and functional similarity to cocaine and amphetamine (normally considered bad for kids). Skeptics also note that the disease for which it is allegedly a cure, "attention deficit hyperactivity disorder," is better recognized as a set of behaviors that teachers find irritating, with no objectively verifiable chemical or organic cause. Physicians and psychologists who publicly oppose dosing kids with Ritalin, such as Peter Breggin, Fred Baughman, and Richard De Grandpre, all report hearing from many distraught parents who, like the Carrolls, are upset about what the drug does to their children. Such parents commonly report implied pressure from schools to drug their child lest the kid be booted from school. Thus, schools can leverage coercive power without openly bringing in child protective services or the courts. Facing a court order to continue drugging their son, the Carrolls found another pediatrician, who decided Kyle didn’t need Ritalin after all. Since it was a doctor’s decision and not theirs, this satisfied the court order (and shed some light on the scientific value of Ritalin diagnoses). Kyle is now off Ritalin, and is in a special education school instead of the traditional public one that called in the cops. He’s doing fine, says his mother. Still, the state insists it must drop in from time to time. "The only thing they do is still come out and make sure everything is all right," she tells me. "Every other week, they come in and say, ‘Hi, Kyle.’ Kyle says ‘hi,’ and they walk away." _______ So the schools do get ritalin prescribed for the student without the parents consent but only by getting a court order. Your right that it usually requires parental consent, but the parents are told that the child will be removed from the school if the parents don't agree to have the child recieve ritalin. Tim