Tuesday 1 May 2007

The Drugs Don't Work

As a kid (in the 60's and 70's) I had the mixed blessing of having fairly modern, enlightened parents who didn't believe in hitting naughty children. Instead my parents, who I assume had either read the works of child-rearing guru; Doctor Benjamin Spock, or were simply part of the benevolent revolution his writings generated, would try reasoning with me, crafting careful sentences that would cause the enormity of my various crimes to seep fully into my psyche until I became, by degrees, conditioned by reason rather than by violence, to behave in a reasonably non-sociopathic manner.

Though this approach had it's negative consequences (self-esteem the size of a rice-grain, paranoiac nightmare of an adolescence that stretched out roughly to the age of 30), I eventually "got my head together" and was able to incorporate this non-violent child-rearing philosophy into a pacifist life philosophy that I still generally observe.

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) did not exist when I was a kid. Naughty kids were just naughty and parents had to deal with it using whatever strategies they had at their disposal. The World Health Organization (WHO) officially introduced Attention Defecit Disorder (ADD) to the world in 1980 when it listed the condition in its International Classification of Diseases (ICD). By 1994 the ICD had changed ADD to ADHD and a new revolution in parenting was on its way: Now that naughtiness was a medical condition, parents no longer had to waste energy on hitting their naughty kids, or psychoanalyzing them. Instead, all they had to do was get hold of a prescription and medicate the buggers into submission!! Now that's a 21st century type of solution ... why hadn't anyone thought of it before?

Well, of course, they had.

Ritalin (chemical name: Methylphenidate) was patented in 1954 by the Swiss, Ciba pharmaceutical company (now Novartis) and has been given to "hyperactive" kids since the 1960's, although it wasn't until the 90's that it started being prescribed in the prodigious quantities we hear about these days. In Australia over a quarter of a million prescriptions are written for Ritalin each year. For the U.S., though it's difficult to obtain actual numbers, it's estimated that about 5 million kids are on Ritalin.

You don't have to look far to encounter the controversy surrounding this drug and claims of overdiagnosis and over-prescription. Disgruntled non-Novartis-shareholders worldwide are pointing to a generation of compliant zombie-kids, robbed of their personalities and sleep-walking through their childhoods. But really, what did we expect? Didn't we get exactly what we were asking for? We no longer need to look to religion (as Marx did 160 years ago) to provide the masses with their opiate. We enlightened 21st century types have no use for metaphor, instead, we took a page out of Huxley's Brave New World, and got ourselves a real opiate (sorry, an amphetamine actually ...) to force down the collective throat of the the most truly insurgent sector of society; our kids.

And now the 90's Ritalin kids are growing up, going to High School and getting jobs. At last, the dream should be starting to come to full fruition; A compliant generation of zombie-kids, becoming a compliant zombie work-force, what better? Except that something's going wrong. Instead of these kids doing what they're told and getting on with their designated duties, they're going crazy, becoming unpredictable and committing violent and indecent acts!!

Damn! Looks like we screwed up again. Don't tell me we're going to have to start talking to the little buggers again. I don't even know what language they speak these days. How do you say "right" and "wrong" in teen parlance? I guess we're just going to have to ask them.

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