READING, ‘RITING, & RITALIN. (12 MAY 2016)

In Huxley’s picture of the future in his 1932 novel Brave New World, Huxley pictured a Global One World State where people were kept happy by being drugged with Soma. He got the name from an ancient Indian intoxicant. Huxley accurately thought that the threat to book reading was not censorship, but a world where no one would want to read books anymore. In 1958, Huxley wrote Brave New World Revisited, where he announced that the world was approaching his dystopian utopian Brave New World much faster than he expected. And in terms of “Soma” we have arrived. If rebellious Huck Finn & indolent Tom Sawyer lived today, they would join the lines of 1 million school children being given Ritalin (not to mention Metdate, Concerta, Adderall, Dexedrine, Prozac etc.) by school nurses. (By the way, for readers of this, who have not read “Brave New World” or Orwell’s “1984”, I recommend both.)

LABELING & OVERMEDICATING & ZONING OUT. There are two categories of relatively defenseless people who are being overmedicated, esp. with psychotropic drugs: children & the elderly. (Actually a third, inmates.) Psychotropic drugs are being handed out like candy to kids. In some communities, one in 5 boys are on it. 70% of Group Home children receive it. (More on all this soon.) But the picture is worse, many adults are desperate to zone out & try to manipulate the System to get drugs, and many doctors are giving them their wishes. I just recently was behind a man at a cash register who was complaining to the clerk that they wanted to take him off his psychotropic drugs. And I just spoke with a hospital employee very alarmed at the constant influx of drug seekers who wanted help to zone out. Contrariwise, there are adult children of the elderly who are concerned at the potpourri of interactive drugs that are given their parents which actually cause most of their parents’ problems!! And parents who don’t want their children to join the 4 million children who take Ritalin in America, and risk the school reporting them to Child Protective Services (CPS). CPS will then threaten parents with taking their children away if they refuse to drug their children. CPS tells the parents & other authorities that it is child abuse to withhold meds. 13.5% of children under CPS care are given Ritalin. However, the issue about whether ADHD even exists is not settled. One source stated, that Americans have a “deep ambivalence about whether or not ADD/ADHD even exists.”(A) It came into existence when the DSM-III manual came out in 1980.

SAY NO TO DRUGS, SAY YES TO RITALIN (Says our govt. & schools). Our surgeon general said that Ritalin was under prescribed to American children!! (America’s not quite achieved Brave New World standards.) Legal drugs are worse gateway drugs than marijuana; 1 in 15 people who begin to use pain killers recreationally are said to end up on heroin. A girl given Percocet by her dentist for pain ended up with a heroin addiction. It takes a chemist to see microscopically determine the slight difference chemically between cocaine & Ritalin. The large difference in their name hides their similarity. One man I knew was very angry that Ritalin forced on him as a school child resulted in his cocaine addiction. It is a little known fact that more children die of overdose of prescription drugs than heroin, meth, & cocaine combined. Yet, the abuse of legal pharma drugs is not widely talked about. Big Pharma influences physicians to overprescribe. A Clinical Pharmacist said, “Overmedication is a true epidemic. It’s completely out of hand.”(B) One govt. report contradicts the surgeon general. It stated: “… a large proportion of children in foster care in the USA are being provided with too many psychotropic medications with little or no oversight by their respective states. The finding [is] that children in care are being provided with medications (stimulants) at higher rates than the general population appears to be widespread.”(C)

FULL OF LIFE. Children are full of energy. But a lively child today can be labelled “hyperactive” and drugged. Yet this hyperactivity would naturally diminish as the child matures. 41% of the children in foster care are using 3 or more psychotropic drugs. Being full of life & energy is not a life-threatening situation. Rights? Options? Does bad behavior=medical disorder? I can categorically say that I never, never saw the behavior problems with children in the Amish communities; and I taught Amish elementary school for 2 yrs. What this clearly shows is that our society is doing things wrong. Pregnant mothers are smoking. Children are being seized by CPS from their parents & thrown into abusive foster homes. Children grow up in violent anti-social hoods. Children are fed sugar and their minds violent computer games & T.V. Too many children suffer t.b.m.c. from our govt.’s various agencies. An Amish child learns to be patient and sit still as he grows up going to church. He sits still like everyone else for hours & it becomes natural. Where does a modern child learn to sit still?? “Get that kid on Ritalin!” Or as they label it: “psychopharmacological therapy”.

But is it therapy? There are no studies showing it helps kids. Some parents say the psychotropic drugs made their kids worse. And a psychotropic drug can stultify a child’s brain so it fails tests & zombies through school. The side effects of Ritalin (for various reasons) are to delay a child’s development. Common adverse effects include insomnia, anorexia, headaches, nausea, abdominal pain, sadness, & irritability. And yet there are parents suing the school districts to force these schools to give their children psychotropic drugs. And 2 modern Amer. laws say the schools have to dispense the drugs (ADA title II & Sect. 504 of the Rehab. Act). Yet, there are alternatives to helping kids without resorting to psychotropic drugs. Chris Mercogliano has written a book about an Albany, NY free school that used no psychotropic drugs to have success with problem children.(D) Responsible parents who have children should recognize that they will have to keep them out of public schools. Parents also have to be sophisticated in how you deal with authorities—there are ways to cover yourself, and look responsible without setting off alarms that get your kids seized by the govt.

PHARMA & WITCHCRAFT. It was prophesied in the Bible that this kind of widespread drug use promoted by the occult world would be prevalent in end times. Christ rejected a pain killer as he hung on the cross. As many readers know there has been widespread historical use of opium & hallucinogenics around the world: opium through Asia, Kava in the So. Pacific, & alcohol in Europe. The mystery religions used drugs, for instance, the Eleussian Temples & their Ephiphany to the Goddess. (Although some debate this last example.) The Oracle of Delphi is another Greek example. Malleus Malleficarum, a medieval encyclopedic study of devil worship noted the connection of witchcraft to drug use. To commune with spirits & have strange experiences, medieval witches would put hallucinogenic ointments on brooms to “ride”. Their broom trips were drug trips. Some ancient uses for drugs were legit, like Marking Nut (Baladhur) was used to strengthen memory. As with so many things, proper use of God given healing herbs are being twisted into needless addictions that make both pharma & the narcotics underground lots of money.

FINAL THOUGHTS. The sadness in my spirit over all this made this article hard to write. But I was propelled forward with the realization that a large segment of our younger generation are being lost to drugs, and that many in our culture want psychotropic drugs to zone out. Many parents are accepting drugs for their children out of ignorance wanting to follow the recommended solutions to their child’s problem. We are not dealing with the underlying problems. We have truly arrived at Brave New World.

(A) Health Risk & Society, Oct-Dec. 2011, p. 621 (B) “Is Your Parent Overmedicated”, Catholic Digest, Sept. 1, 2009, p. 92. (C) ACF-Administration for Children and Families, 2012 (D) Mercogliano, Chris. Teaching the Restless: One School’s Remarkable No-Ritalin Approach to Helping Children Learn & Succeed. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003.