Just Say No To Drugs
by Great Orion Voyager  © 2009
thorkorps



JUST SAY NO TO DRUGS:  Just say no to anti-depressants: Millions of healthy American teens are being addicted to Ritalin, Prozac, Paxil and other psychotropic drugs just to make drug companies rich.  Dr. Peter Breggin is a psychiatrist and outspoken critic of Ritalin, Prozac, Paxil and other psychotropic drugs.  Breggin points out that psychiatrists in other nations do not recognize mental disorders that are inventions of American drug marketing.

Attention Deficit Disorder and Bipolar Manic Depression are destroying lives only in America:   Drug companies market them as “disorders” and not diseases because there is no real pathology:  THESE ARE NOT DISEASES:  If you feel frustrated, you are having a “disorder.”   Ritalin is methamphetamine:  Ritalin scrambles brains, stunts growth and causes addiction.  Doctors get bribes for writing Ritalin prescriptions.   Majority of the cost of these drugs goes for marketing.

Drug capitalists just want your cash or insurance coverage:  Half the boys of single moms in the ghetto are on Ritalin, paid for by insurance.  Rebellious behavior mislabeled as ADD and depression is a symptom of American culture:  Divorce is epidemic.   Boys are being raised by single moms and taught by female teachers without any male role models.  Humans evolved over a million year evolution to be hunter-gatherers. Boys evolved to climb trees and chase rabbits.   Energetic, restless, impatient boys are not the problem.  Schools are the problem:  School sucks.  Male teachers in urban schools are vital role models for kids raised by single moms.

Anti-psychotic drugs do benefit schizoid psychotics, but there is a big difference between a schizoid psychotic and a suburbanite secretary addicted to Prozac just because she’s bored with her lousy job. Relentless marketing of dangerous drugs bombards all media:   Always pictures of young pretty women looking sad:  “Feeling sad?  You need treatment for your disorder!  Call us now!”  TREATMENT ALWAYS MEANS DRUGS:  No therapy.   No counseling.   No lifestyle change.

Now drug capitalists are pushing into foreign markets, shouting that all British kids have ADD and depression and need drugs. These drugs are being clinically proven to cause Addiction and Withdrawal.  Ritalin, Prozac, Paxil and most “lifestyle drugs” should be illegal.

Drug capitalists are drug pushers run amok trying to addict the public to dangerous drugs:   Humans are naturally addicted to anything that produces euphoria or serotonin high or endorphin release. Replace addiction with strength, health, fitness:  Bodybuild, hike wilderness.  Quit your lousy job.  See the world. Gain Wisdom.  VISION QUEST.  You’ll feel better:  You’ll be CURED WITHOUT DRUGS.

Your mind is sacred:  Don't pollute it with addictive poison.  JUST SAY NO TO DRUGS.





MY RITALIN TESTIMONY

Ritalin is Petite Bourgeoisie Materialism at its worst:  Better living through chemicals.  Absurd.  Ritalin was the worst thing my parents ever did to me.  Overworked teachers in lousy public schools didn’t want to deal with behavior. Doctors bribed by Ciba-Geigy Novartis wrote me a Ritalin prescription paid by my dad’s insurance, yet he never knew I was on it.  So many millions of kids are on Ritalin in America no one questions it.  Irrationally worshipping doctors, mom never questioned this doctor bribed by Ciba-Giegy.  Only in America could Ritalin be treated as harmless as a breakfast vitamin.  Doctors in other nations are horrified that millions of kids are being fed dangerous brain-altering drugs for no reason.

Mom shrieked: “You have Attention Deficit Disorder Mental Retardation!  You have a bad brain!  Doctors say so!  Take your Smart Pill!”  Ritalin is meth and I got addicted quick:  Couldn’t think without my Smart Pill:  Pop one for breakfast, one for lunch, one for dinner, seven days a week, even on weekends, even when school was out for summer.  Look in the mirror and frown:  “I have Attention Deficit Disorder Mental Retardation.  I have a bad brain.  Doctors say so.  But I got my Smart Pill!”

I went from being a healthy energetic boy climbing trees to a sick catatonic zombie:  Ritalin is methamphetamine and had a terrible effect on me:  Constant trembling.  No appetite.  Never ate anything.  Anorexic just like ma wanted me to be.  Ritalin made me so nauseous I threw up every week. Threw up twice in math class.  Ate holes in my belly.  Spent a week in hospital in sixth grade.  Hospital nurse gave me powdered milk, erroneously assuming my stomach pain was lactose intolerance.  Never been lactose intolerant.  Soon as I got home, I got a new jumbo bottle of Ritalin.  Doctor refilled my prescription for six years over the phone without seeing me.

Third grade through ninth grade, age 7 to 13, I was so strung out on Ritalin I could barely move:  Short, skinny, malnourished, anorexic.  Uncoordinated, trip over my own feet, lousy at sports.  At softball everyone howled for my blood chanting:  “EASY OUT EASY OUT EASY OUT!“   At basketball my shot barely touched the rim.  Always picked last on team.  Coach shrugging, “Come on someone gotta pick him!”  Always wheezing out of breathe.  Horrible asthma and acne.  Childhood nothing but Ritalin, asthma inhalers, acne, trembling hands, nauseous gut and empty refrigerator.

Sophomore Year High School my doctor abruptly stopped refills without seeing me:  Ritalin withdrawal was painful.  Convinced I needed it because mom said I had Attention Deficit Disorder Mental Retardation.  How could I think without Ritalin?  Hoarded my last bottle, reserving it for tests and final exams.  Did excellent job hoarding my last bottle:  Still had pills by Freshman Year in university dorms.  Crushed and snorted last dozen pills as a party drug when we pulled all-nighters.

Ritalin causes psychosis:  Off Ritalin I went nuts, set fires, broke windows, shoplifted, vandalized walls with graffiti, ditched classes every day.  Withdrawal made me hateful, moody and violent.  Started carrying concealed knives.  Off Ritalin I finally enjoyed a growth spurt Junior Year High School.  Grew muscles and testosterone.  Started lifting weights and learning Karate.  Got a blue belt and began beating victims.  Getting off Ritalin felt like getting out of prison.  Suddenly I was a wild animal escaped from his cage, runaway grizzly galloping loose.  Luckily I replaced Ritalin with pot and beer.  Smoked pot every day Senior Year.  Barely graduated high school. 

Ritalin almost ruined my life:   Ritalin leaches calcium and causes osteoporosis.  Ritalin caused my humpback kyphosis which required surgery when I was at university.  Ritalin isn’t even a good high:  If you want a Ritalin high, just drink six cups of coffee.  Feel sick, nauseous, rocks grinding gut, brain awash in waves of paranoia and self-doubt.  That’s a Ritalin high.  Paranoia and self-doubt and low self-esteem was my childhood.

No one cared:  Fell through the cracks of lousy overcrowded public schools.  Never talked to a school counselor in my life.   No one knew my divorced parents wanted nothing to do with me.  No one knew I was a Ritalin addict.  No one knew I suffered severe Ritalin withdrawal and probably would have brought an AK-47 to school and shot everyone Senior Year High School.  Luckily I couldn’t find anyone willing to sell me rifles.  Smoking pot kept me relatively nonviolent.  I can identify with school shooters and violent felons rotting in prison.  Way to go, Ciba-Geigy Novartis.

Just a boy who liked to run around wildflower meadows, chase rabbits and climb trees.  There is no such thing as Attention Deficit Disorder.  I’ll hate Ritalin pushers Ciba Geigy Novartis forever.  I’ll never forgive them for stunting my life and ruining my childhood.  Ritalin should be illegal.




Dr. Peter Breggin, TALKING BACK TO RITALIN, Da Capo Press, 2001 www.breggin.com

pp.3-5  "Recent studies have shown that 7-10% or more of America's school-age children are being prescribed stimulant drugs to control their behavior, and the actual figures may be higher.  The percentage of boys being drugged is disproportionately large and probably reaches or exceeds 15-20%....  While there are no comprehensive statistics concerning the total number of children taking stimulants, it probably is reaching 4-5 million (almost 10% of school children) and may grow much greater....  A large, ever-increasing segment of America's children are being subjected to drugs to control their minds and behavior.  No such experiment in mass drugging has ever before been attempted in the history of any society or nation.  Never before have so many parents been told that their children need psychiatric drug treatment....  This unprecedented situation is not the result of some inexplicable increase in 'mental illness.'  It is instead the result of an increasing failure to identify and meet the needs of children in our homes, schools and communities."

p 6  "All of these drugs are amphetamine-like (Ritalin, Metadate and Concerta) or they are outright amphetamines (Adderall, Dexedrine, Desoxyn, Gradument).  For most purposes, they can be considered as one class of drug with a similar adverse reaction profile, including a high potential for addiction and abuse.  For example, each of them has been placed in Schedule II of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).  Schedule II, which also includes cocaine, opium, morphine, and the most dangerous barbiturates, is intended for drugs with the most extreme abuse and addiction potential."

pp 7-8  "In my private practice of psychiatry, where I work with adults and children, desperate parents often bring their children to me as a last resort....  Here is a pattern I have seen repeated a number of times in recent months:  First the child is put on Ritalin or Adderall for minor school or family problems.  When the stimulant causes insomnia, a sedating drug like Klonopin (clonazepam) or clonidine is added at night.  When the drug combination makes the child depressed, an antidepressant like Prozac or Paxil is added.  When the three drugs impair the child's emotional stability, making him aggressive and unpredictable for the first time, the parents are told that their child's 'bipolar' or 'manic depressive' disorder has 'emerged.'  Now lithium or Depakote is added as a 'mood stabilizer.'  When this medically negligent over-dosing with four drugs leads to bizarre behavior, the child is put on an antipsychotic such as Risperdal or Zyprexa....  This cocktail of medications was guaranteed to ruin the child's mental life and eventually to leave lasting harmful effects....  What had brought the full force of biopsychiatry upon Raymond?  His father and mother were divorced, and his mother had custody.  Raymond had been caught in escalating personal conflicts with his mother and she had taken him to doctors who immediately began to treat Raymond with drugs.  Although he was only nine years old and weighing little more than seventy pounds, Raymond was now taking large doses of four psychoactive drugs."  

pp 30-33  "Ritalin is not candy for the brain.  Ritalin and other stimulants produce gross impairments of brain function.  There is a serious risk of permanent brain malfunction....  Many children become sad, tearful, depressed, apathetic, and simply tired, while taking stimulants.  Many go through cycles of feeling energized and exhausted….  Often children are lethargic when taking the drug during the day, but develop a 'hyper' rebound at night that worsens their behavior and makes it hard for them to sleep....  Stimulants commonly interfere with the learning process.  They focus the child in a narrow and obsessive way that may look good superficially, while real learning is impeded.  The stimulants can make children psychotic.  They become suspicious and distrustful, imagine things that are unreal, and even hallucinate small insects or objects.  They can become artificially energized into a state of mania, a condition characterized by grandiose plans, bizarre notions of invulnerability, poor judgment, and sometimes paranoia and violence....  Stimulants frequently suppress growth.  Since they do so not only by suppressing appetite but also by disrupting growth hormones, the growth suppression involves the entire body and all its organs.  For this reason alone, giving stimulants to children is a bad idea."

pp 47-48  "If a stimulant drug is abruptly stopped, withdrawal symptoms frequently set in, potentially causing a severe worsening of behavior.  Withdrawal is called rebound if the reaction is worse than the child's original baseline behavior.  Some children can become psychotic on withdrawal from Ritalin and other stimulants.  Other children 'crash,' becoming depressed and even suicidal….  Withdrawal results from the brain's resistance to the effects of a medication....  The drug suppresses the brain; the brain reacts....  With relatively short-acting stimulants such as Ritalin, Dexedrine and Adderall, rebound can occur a few hours after taking the drug, making the child more inattentive or hyperactive than before taking the medication."

pp 51-53  "There is now a mountain of evidence that stimulants disrupt growth hormone production on a daily basis and that they also can reduce the child's overall growth, including height and weight....  By the mid 1970's the effect of Ritalin and other stimulants in disrupting growth hormone levels in most subjects was already unequivocal....  Since growth suppression results from a generalized impairment in growth hormone production, all organs of the body are likely to be affected.  Not only height and weight, but head size, and brain size, are being reduced....  Growth rebound after stopping stimulants is taken as a positive sign by ADHD/Ritalin advocates.  However, rebound does not necessarily mean the child has fully recovered....  Rebound, if anything, is a powerful sign that the body has been harmed and is trying to recuperate....  Increasing numbers of children are being continued on the medication into young adulthood....  Under such circumstances, there will be no significant rebound."

p 80-81  "Between the ages of five to fifteen, the period of time when most Ritalin is prescribed, the brain undergoes new and striking changes in function and even composition.  Frequently used nerve pathways are firmed up while others disappear from lack of use.  There is a pruning back of up to 40% of brain connections (synapses) in the frontal lobes of the brain....  It is incredible that so many doctors are willing to soak the child's brain in drugs during these periods of astonishing growth and change....  Can a child or adolescent brain drenched in these drugs develop in a normal fashion?  It seems at the very least improbable....  Instead of improving brain function, Ritalin and other stimulants create severe biochemical imbalances.  They do not normalize the brain; they render it abnormal.  This cannot be overemphasized:  Stimulants produce pathological malfunctions in the child's brain.  Whenever these drugs have any direct effect on the child's mind or behavior, they do so by disrupting brain function."

pp 216-217  "In the 1970's, the American Psychiatric Association was going broke....  Always near the bottom of the medical income scale, psychiatrists were floundering economically….  Psychologists, social workers, counselors, family therapists and other non-psychiatrists were taking over the mental health field....  Psychiatry had to convince the American public that psychological suffering should remain under the ultimate control of physicians, including psychiatrists.  To do this, psychiatry had to convince the public that emotional or spiritual suffering is rooted in genetics and biology, requiring drugs, electroshock and other medical interventions.... By elaborating on ADHD as a 'disorder,' psychiatric interventions with drugs became more justified....  In the early 1980's, APA made a decision that changed its history and that of our society.  It decided to create an economic and political partnership with the drug companies….  Backed by the multi-billion dollar drug industry, psychiatry hoped to defeat the threat from non-medical professionals such as psychologists and social workers.  Within a scant few years, APA transformed itself from a failing institution into one of the most powerful political forces in the nation."

pp 222-223  "The company that manufactures Ritalin is a giant among giants.  When Ciba combined with Sandoz to create Novartis in 1996, it was advertised as 'the largest corporate merger... New Company Novartis captures number one worldwide position in life sciences... number two global rank in pharmaceuticals.'  The press release boasted that 'Ciba has recorded double-digit annual earnings growth over the past five years.'  Novartis (1996) spent almost twice as much on marketing and distribution as on research and development.  Much of what gets called research and development is in reality devoted to marketing….  Novartis, the parent company of Ciba, has a sales force of 2,300 in the United States alone.  Most doctors seem to get their basic drug information from drug company sales reps."

pp 276-277  "In TALKING BACK TO PROZAC (1994) we pointed out that all of the major clinical effects of Prozac and related drugs such as Zoloft and Paxil are similar to the stimulants.  Prozac can cause euphoria, agitation, irritability, aggression, insomnia, weight loss, and in the extreme, psychotic mania.  It can lead to 'crashing' with depression and suicidal feelings.  It can also narrow attention and cause obsessive focusing....  The rush to drug America's children with antidepressants is taking place amid increasing evidence that they are of no benefit whatsoever for children....  Although the King study was conducted before the highly publicized school shootings, one 12-year-old boy on Prozac developed nightmares about shooting his classmates and had difficulty distinguishing his nightmares from reality.  I have reviewed these studies in more detail in RECLAIMING OUR CHILDREN (2000) where I have related the prescription of psychiatric drugs to some of the school shootings....  Meanwhile, Eli Lilly is conducting an enormously costly PR campaign for Prozac with three-page advertisements in many of America's major magazines such as Time, Newsweek and Cosmopolitan....  Is this a multi-million dollar blockbuster PR campaign to sell drugs?  Heavens no.  According to Eli Lilly, the purpose is to 'promote depression awareness and education.'  The recent 17% growth in Prozac sales is attributed to this ad campaign."


pp 284-285  "The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA 1995) has observed: 'Most European physicians are extremely reluctant to prescribe methylphenidate [Ritalin] or any other stimulant for what they believe to be a conduct or behavior problem in children... Quite clearly the United States is the only country in the world that has so thoroughly embraced the notion that a large number of our children are suffering from a neurobiological disorder that needs to be treated with a potent psychostimulant as a first-line treatment for behavioral control.'...  Gene Haislip, a recently retired DEA official, warns, 'We have become the only country in the world where children are prescribed such a vast quantity of stimulants that share virtually the same properties as cocaine.’…  Only an outraged citizenry can stop this massive psychiatric drug abuse of our children."

p. 332-333  "All children need small classrooms, interesting educational materials, inspired teachers and devoted parents.  They all need a carefully balanced mixture of unconditional love, rational discipline, inspiring educational activities, and play.  They all need good role models....  Will we sit by idly while a large percentage of our children are drugged into conformity with poorly trained teachers and outmoded schools?  Have common sense, ethics, and love of our children been crushed beneath the ADHD/Ritalin avalanche?  A great deal depends on us as individuals--whether we are willing to band together and speak out in public against the ADHD/Ritalin movement and for a more child-centered America."



www.breggin.com
Vital Information About Ritalin, Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder and the Politics Behind the ADHD/Ritalin Movement from Talking Back to Ritalin by Peter R. Breggin, M.D.
Common Courage Press, P.O. Box 702, Monroe, Maine 04951.  Phone: 1-800-497-3207.
For the purpose of alerting the public, this appendix to Talking Back to Ritalin by Peter R. Breggin, M.D. may be reprinted without permission:

Ritalin and amphetamine have almost identical adverse effects on the brain, mind and behavior, including the production of drug-induced behavioral disorders, psychosis, mania, drug abuse, and addiction.  Ritalin and amphetamine frequently cause the very same problems they are supposed to treat--inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity.  A large percentage of children become robotic, lethargic, depressed, or withdrawn on stimulants.

Ritalin can retard growth in children by disrupting the cycles of growth hormone released by the pituitary gland.  Withdrawal from Ritalin can cause emotional suffering, including depression, exhaustion, and suicide. This can make children seem psychiatrically disturbed and lead mistakenly to increased doses of medication.  Ritalin is addictive and can become a gateway drug to other addictions.

Short-term, Ritalin suppresses creative, spontaneous and autonomous activity in children, making them more docile and obedient, and more willing to comply with rote, boring tasks, such as classroom school work and homework.

There is no solid evidence that ADHD is a genuine disorder or disease of any kind.

WARNING!   When trying to withdraw from many psychiatric drugs, patients can develop serious and even life-threatening emotional and physical reactions. In short, it is dangerous not only to start taking psychiatric drugs but also can be hazardous to stop taking them. Therefore, withdrawal from psychiatric drugs should be done under clinical supervision. Principles of drug withdrawal are discussed in Your Drug May Be Your Problem: How and Why to Stop Taking Psychiatric Medications, by Peter R. Breggin, M.D. and David Cohen, Ph.D.  Other information on Prozac and Prozac-like drugs can be found in Talking Back to Prozac by Peter R. Breggin, M.D. and Ginger Ross Breggin.