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Bush also successfully rammed through the Orwellian-named New Freedom Initiative. This forces every child in America from age five to eighteen to be psychologically tested twice a year. Whether you’re home-schooled, private schooled or public schooled. The guidelines for mental illness were written by a consortium of drug companies. And in their own internal documentation they brag they will go from 15% of children on psychotropic drugs and Ritalin to over 50% ... This is the type of nightmare only Joseph Stalin could dream of. Alex Jones, Martial Law 9/11: The Rise of the Police State, 2005
In 2001 Frontline reported on the dramatic rise in the number of children being given behaviour modifying medications. Frontline: The Medicated Child, PBS 2008
A teacher suggested he was hyperactive … In pre-school another teacher suggested medication … and prescribed Ritalin … It made him anxious. ibid.
A steep rise in the diagnosis and treatment of childhood mental illnesses of all kinds. ibid.
Tens of thousands of children are being prescribed powerful medication to control hyperactivity and improve their behaviour. According to the latest figures prescriptions for these drugs have almost doubled in the last five years. But now Britain’s leading psychological societies are calling for an urgent review. So is medication being used as a chemical cosh for kids? Tonight: Chemical Cosh for Kids? ITV 2011
The number of prescriptions for drugs to combat ADHD has gone up from 480,00 to 800,000 in the last 5 years. Most of the drugs are stimulants, and work like the illegal drugs speed or cocaine. But for ADHD sufferers they radically increase focus and help concentration in the classroom. ibid.
The medication has side effects. And some of them are serious. ibid.
Bigger and bigger doses are required to achieve the same effect. ibid.
Diagnoses of mental disorders in children and adolescents are increasing at an alarming rate, particularly in the USA where the number of manic depressive children has gone up by 4000% over the past 10 years. The most widely used treatments are psychotropic drugs. Panorama: Kids on Pills, BBC 2000
In Europe different medical terms are applied to psychiatric irregularities in children ... The bipolar profile fitted a mere 7% of patients. ibid.
ADHD is currently the most frequent mental illness in children. ibid.
Using psychotropic drugs to treat children is a very recent science. ibid.
The tendency to reach out for pills is increasing in Europe too. ibid.
And of course to make sure that there’s a big market for Ritalin, then what you do is encourage the food companies to put as much Aspartame into the food as they possibly can; especially in food that’s targeted at young children ... Get them on the Kiddy Coke. I mean, Ritalin is like cocaine. I mean, the medical profession, the medical scientists, don’t even really understand how this works. Because Ritalin is a stimulant. But actually in a youth is has the opposite effect ... The British government by the way spent £28 million last year on Ritalin. In America 10% of all children of school age are prescribed Ritalin ... And of course the whole idea here is that Ritalin is the kindergarten for Prozac. One of the best-selling drugs in the world. Ian R Crane, lecture Liverpool 2008
This is an extremely pernicious drug ... In the US 10% of all school-aged children are prescribed Ritalin. 10%! Ian R Crane, lecture ‘Codex Alimentarius’
5The New Freedom Commission is a federal program to mandate the bogus screening and compulsory medication of children from infancy through eighteen years of age in this country through the use of completely inappropriate screening techniques. Any child who deviates from the prescribed feeling and thought pattern that is allowed to have them will be compulsorily medicated, even over the objection of their parents, with dangerous, unproven and untested psychiatric medications to control their thoughts, their behaviours and to impede their emotional development. This is a federally mandated program. Dr Rima Laibow, cited One Nation Under Siege, 2006
The Scandal of Kiddy Coke: thousands of hyperactive children are being given Ritalin (which can stunt growth) or even schizophrenia drugs. Are they victims of greedy drug firms – and doctors – too quick to diagnose a condition many say doesn’t even exist? Mail on Sunday article 27th November 2007, ‘The Scandal of Kiddy Coke’
Perhaps most disturbing is the suggestion that ADHD is nothing more than the invention of pharmaceutical companies who have used clinical trials to create a disease that can be treated with their drugs. ibid.
This is Liam. Aged five he was disruptive, hyperactive, and unable to focus ... Now, five years later, Liam’s life has been transformed. His new-found ability to concentrate is largely due to a drug called Methylphenidate. Best known to most of us as a brand name: Ritalin ... These drugs were originally designed fifty years ago for the treatment of adults with depression. Horizon: Pill Poppers, BBC 2010
ADHD is believed to be caused by an imbalance of key chemical messengers in the areas of the brain that control attention and memory. Ritalin appears to make these messengers more effective, helping to restore attention. Like all drugs, Ritalin comes with a cost. ibid.
‘To drug or not to drug our kids, that is the question we need to be asking – ourselves, our political leaders, and our medical establishment’. So wrote Arianna Huffington on April 2, 2007 in her insightful review of Lisa Loomer’s play Distracted. Now, almost four years later, even more parents have clearly landed on the side of ‘to drug’. As for our political leaders and the medical establishment, they have been lulled into trancelike compliance by the billions spent by drug companies on lobbying, campaign donations, perks, and research funding. The Huffington Post online article 28th March 2011, ‘Why Are We Still Medicating Our Kids?’
Stephanie Hall would be a young woman now, maybe a mother, if she hadn’t died in her sleep from a massive cardiac arrest six days before her twelfth birthday. She had been in first grade less than one month when her teacher told Stephanie’s mom she thought the little girl had Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). Stephanie’s concerned parents took the perfectly healthy child to a physician and everything was found to be normal. But because the teacher had already labelled the child with ADD, the physician wrote a prescription for Ritalin. Poor Stephanie was too young to make her parents understand how ill the drug made her feel. It began with headaches and over the years led to hallucinations. Her heart disease was a silent side effect of the drug. Her parents paid the monster for six years to poison and terrorize their daughter. Even when Stephanie began to suffer hallucinations from the mind-altering drug, the answer was always to increase the dosage. No one considered the drug as the cause of Stephanie’s problems. Now Stephanie has no problems and her parents live with the loss. K L Carlson, How the Pharmaceutical Industry is Preying on Our Children
Many parents around the country have discovered that Ritalin has become a condition for their children continuing in school. There are even reports, by parents, of threats from social agencies: ‘If you don't allow us to prescribe Ritalin for your ADHD child, we may decide that you are an unfit parent. We may decide to take your child away.' Jon Rappaport, article ‘Ritalin – The Hidden Effects’
In his book Talking Back to Ritalin Dr Peter Breggin expands on the drug’s effects: ‘Stimulants such as Ritalin and amphetamine ... have grossly harmful impacts on the brain – reducing overall blood flow, disturbing glucose metabolism, and possibly causing permanent shrinkage or atrophy of the brain’. ibid.
And one should not forget that Ritalin came out of a Swiss drug giant called Ciba Geigy (now Novartis) fifty years ago. That company once had very close business ties with the infamous Nazi cartel, I G Farben. Farben stood for inhuman experiments on human beings. ibid.
In the same year, the Washington Post published the fact that Ritalin which is prescribed to very young children had never been tested on that age group (under 6s) and yet, between 150,000 – 200,000 children between the ages of 2 and 4 were prescribed Ritalin. Hilary Butler, letter to BMJ 2004