It's the drug companies that are hyperactive

An opinion piece by Lawrence J. De Maria in the Naple Sun Times

I don't always agree with Bill Maher, the acerbic TV pundit. I was angry with him for months for his intemperate remarks right after 9/11.

But the other night one of his rants struck a chord, mainly because it was about something I have been ranting about for years: the assault on American kids by major drug companies.

Maher argued that those companies, Merck, Pfizer and the rest, are turning our children into a bunch of junkies by promoting drugs to treat such things as ADD, hyperactivity and other disorders, "diseases" that didn't exist until the health-care industry - including health-care professionals who make their living diagnosing and treating them - created the market, so to speak.

Now, I will be the first to admit that there have always been difficult children. I bet Genghis Khan and Attila, not to mention Al Capone, were rips in grammar school. And those busters at Boys Town were certainly no picnic for Spencer Tracy.

I can remember a few miscreants from my parochial school days (or daze) that were almost uncontrollable. I say "almost" because I scarcely remember a situation that the nuns of my youth - and their 12-inch, metal-edged, wooden rulers - couldn't handle.

But is it reasonable to assume that, perhaps, thousands of unruly kids across the nation in the 1950's and 60's have turned into millions of children who must now be dosed with Ritalin and God knows what else?

Of course, this is not the 1950's. More than half the marriages in this country end up in divorce, children born "out of wedlock" are common, many kids never know their fathers and millions of children go to terrible schools, where they are merely warehoused by frustrated or poorly trained teachers. All that could explain an increase in the number of disturbed children.

But the drug companies aren't pushing their "cures" on inner-city kids alone. If they were, it might be understandable, if still despicable. There are millions of kids from fairly stable middle-class families who are diagnosed with developmental and educational disorders that simply did not exist 30 years ago. We all know children who are on drugs for exhibiting behavior that a few decades ago would have been considered annoying, but not abnormal. If that peripatetic film duo, Mickey and Judy, tried to put on one of their shows out in the barn nowadays, they'd be lucky if they weren't given electroshock treatments.

The United States is awash in pills pushed on us by the drug companies. Have you watched the nightly news lately? There is about 12 minutes of "news" per half hour. The rest of the time is devoted mainly to drug ads. That's probably the biggest story the networks are missing. (Of course, they are not missing it; can we expect them to kill the major source of their profits? The same, of course, holds true for newspapers and magazines.) The whole situation makes a mockery of the Justice Department's multi-billion dollar "war on drugs."

It's probably too late to save most of the adults whose medicine cabinets are filled with potency drugs, sleep-aids, anti-depressants, mood enhancers and all the rest.
But we should tell the drug companies to leave our kids alone. They are merely creating another generation of adults who will be dependent on drugs just to get through the day.

Oh. Now I get it!