Wednesday,
March 23, 2005
Believe
it or not, until recently, it has been perfectly legal for schools to force
schoolchildren to be put on psychoactive mind-altering drugs as a condition of
attending that school. That is, the school administrator or counselor could
insist that a certain child be dosed with mind-altering drugs. It sounds
bizarre, but it was absolutely true until just recently.
Finally,
Congress has passed legislation that bans schools from forcing parents
to drug their children for behavioral problems. This law was even signed by
President Bush, believe it or not.
Now
you may think that, gee, this wasn't a problem, I never heard about this. But in
fact it was a huge problem. There have been many cases where children were
denied an education because their parents refused to put them on narcotic
stimulants, antidepressants
and other drugs that we now know cause violent behavior and increased risk of
suicide. There were schools actually forcing parents to put their children on
drugs that would cause aggressive
behavior and suicidal thoughts. And, in extreme cases, these
drugs actually caused or contributed to the kind of mass murders like we saw in
Columbine where the two high school students picked up assault rifles, went to
school, and blew away teachers and classmates. These two kids were on
antidepressant drugs -- it's still one of the most censored stories of the last
decade.
Think
about it: these kids were taking antidepressants when they blew away their
classmates and teachers. And yet the school districts are insisting that more
children be put on these drugs!
Now,
I knew there were problems with the public school system, I knew that a lot of public
education was a complete waste of time and that many public
schools are nothing more than taxpayer funded daycare. But even I was horrified
to learn that our public schools are turning into mental institutions and
forcing children to be dosed on psychoactive drugs just to be there. What
happened to the right of children to have an honest education these days? What
happened to the right of parents to protect their children from the abusive
behavior of drug
companies and psychiatrists who irresponsibly over-prescribe
these drugs even though they're increasingly aware of the toxic, dangerous side
effects of these drugs?
(By
the way, three years ago, anybody who said that antidepressant drugs cause
violent behavior was called a nut case. Now it's a commonly recognized
scientific truth, published in peer-reviewed journals and widely acknowledged by
the scientific community. It just goes to show you how unpopular it is when
you're a few years ahead of the public perception on these things.)
This
law has been needed for quite some time. And who was against this law? Of
course, it was the psychiatrists! The community of psychiatrists did not want to
let go of this power, because when you have the power to force children to take
drugs and to force parents to put children on those drugs, you have consolidated
power over entire communities. That's what the psychiatrists have done -- when
psychiatrists were given the right to prescribe drugs, they were given power,
and they don't want to let go of that power. So they fought bitterly against
this bill and they aren't happy with its passage.
But
of course, they're continuing to just invent new fictitious diseases by
diagnosing children with so-called mental disorders that have no verifiable
scientific basis whatsoever. These diseases are completely fictional (like
"social anxiety disorder" and "attention deficit hyperactivity
disorder"). The hallucinations, it seems, are in the minds of the
psychiatrists, not in the minds of the children. And when it comes to behavioral
disorders, if you want to calm down the children and help them
pay attention and learn more effectively, you've got to look at nutrition, not
drugs. You have to get the sugar
out of their diets, you have to take the food additives and the hydrogenated
oils and the high-fructose corn syrup out of their diets. When you do that, 80%
of these children that have been diagnosed with ADHD become non-ADHD children in
two weeks or less. 80%. All you've got to do is take these food additives out of
their diet, and all of a sudden they're normal, wonderful children who can learn
and focus. They don't need drugs.
The
threshold for drugging children is far too low in this country -- we have far
too many people interested in the power, the profits and the control of drugging
children. And it is laws like this that we need passed in this country. We need
people to know (especially parents) that they don't have to agree to having
their children dosed on toxic drugs. They have the right to say no! They have
the right to protect their children from the ambitions of psychiatrists, the
megalomania of an industry that wants to drug entire populations, and the
profit-seeking ambitions of the pharmaceutical industry.
What's
interesting is that one of the main proponents of this bill was the Citizen's
Commission on Human Rights (CCHR). Other groups that supported this law include
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the
National Foundation of Women Legislators (NFWL), and Parents for a Label and
Drug Free Education.
You
may wonder why the NAACP, in particular, backed legislation like this. The
answer is because it was predominantly black children who were being labeled as
problem children and dosed with these drugs. The black community in
I'm
going to be called a racist for saying this (like I care), but here goes: there
are a lot of white
psychiatrists drugging the heck out of low-income black
children and calling it "medicine." That's not medicine, that's a
chemical assault on the children of
So
let's stop drugging our children and let's start teaching them for a change.
Let's get the psychiatrists out of our schools and get the drug companies away
from our children. Why is it that we teach our children to "just say no to
drugs," and then we turn around and dose them up on powerful narcotics
anyway? What kind of message does that send to our nation's youth?
While
we're at it, let's start paying teachers honest salaries so that we can attract
and retain high-quality people into the teaching industry. Let's start funding
our schools with the money they need to actually provide quality education and
let's have some serious school reform so that we can eliminate the old
bureaucracy that currently runs our public schools all across the country.
We
have a system of education here that's 200 years old; nothing much has changed!
We still have chalkboards, erasers and stodgy lecture formats for conveying
information to students. We need something new in our schools, and there are a
lot of hard-working teachers and administrators who have great ideas but are
shut down by the bureaucracy and psychiatrists who insist on drugging the
students. Let these people have a chance to get some work done, to do the
teaching they want to do, to put new ideas into action and see what works in
terms of educating our children. I believe that teachers are teachers for the
right reason -- they want to work with children; they want to help children
learn. We need to give them the tools and the funds that they need to be better
teachers, and that means making sure our kids are off of drugs so they have the
state of mind necessary for learning.
Because
right now, we're not raising a generation of smart, well-educated children.
We're producing a wave of over-diagnosed, over-drugged, over-labeled children
who are increasingly incapable of functioning as productive citizens in society.
