So there's this drug adderall, right? Oh man, some of my friends do it and let me tell you: that stuff works. I don't mean improves concentration like ginseng 'improves concentration.' I mean it takes one's head and slams it against one's desk until half a semester's work lies in a neat pile completed.
Afterward all that is left are the side effects of, well, who cares.
Adderall is a drug that helps you concentrate; it's like speed. Well, it is speed, but you know, it's... well it works, so who cares what else it does. Anyway, I was horrified to find that one in eight elementary age children (or about six million children) are on this or a similar drug to treat Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder: clearly, this is not enough.
This is not one of those unfair advantages in life, like being the baseball coach's son. These drugs are academic steroids: the players all get better instead of just participating more. Thus, it raises the bar.
As society has raised the threshold in professional sports, so it will make other sectors more competitive. If only an eighth of students take mentally enhancing drugs, this is fundamentally unfair. Drugs should be available to all students who want to improve performance.
If we as a society are going to create a public education system that deals in oppressive, fact driven memorization, how can we conceivably expect students to pay attention for hours on end in early stages of childhood? Obviously, the answer is to put them all on socially corrective drugs. The world has changed and biology simply needs to accelerate (excuse the pun) to catch up.
All satire aside, consider the next quote from pediatrics.about.com:
"Adderall is approved for use in children over age three years. It is generally started at a dose of 2.5 mg in children under age five and gradually increased as necessary."
The phrase "and gradually increased as necessary" should ring alarm bells. Once a child achieves tolerance for the dose of drug (the dose is no longer felt or effective) it is increased. Individuals that have been on corrective stimulants for a number of years have to rotate their drugs to avoid becoming completely tolerant. We have no idea the long-term effects of these drugs, effects on bodies that have borne them over lifetimes since they are a recent invention. This in itself is reason enough not to subject 12.5 percent of our children to physical and psychological dependency.
There are many side effects of the drugs easily researchable online, but "doctors who prescribe stimulant drugs often seem oblivious to the fact that they can cause psychoses, including manic-like and schizophrenic-like disorders." Has anyone seen the film "Requiem For A Dream?"
Surely the rampant increase in prescriptions among children in America and Europe deserves our attention. "Since 1991 prescriptions for all drugs to treat ADHD have quintupled. This year about six million children, roughly one child out of every eight, will take Ritalin or other forms of methylphenidate. The number of stimulants prescribed for children two to four has increased 200 percent to 300 percent between 1991 and 1995. Studies show that stimulants cause especially severe reactions in young children. Since there are no good studies, no one knows what it does to the development of the very young child's brain" (addhelp.org).
Why is medication so popular? Two interconnected reasons: first, it is easier than parenting, and second, there have been major changes to the education system in the last half-century.
When our baby boomer parents were in school, there were no corrective drugs, yet the education system was not in shambles (as would be expected if 12.5 percent of the children could not participate at all). The reason was the teachers had authority the parents backed up.
In schools, teachers used to be allowed to beat students. That was wrong, but with the demise of physical authority and the removal of the Ten Commandments (among other steps to make schools more politically correct), schools lost a lot of the power they had over kids. I assure you, I am not calling for the reinstatement of religion or physical abuse, but simple calculations will show you that K-12 students spend around 24 percent of their waking hours per year (including summers) in school. It is simply a fact schools have a large hand in raising kids. What schools really lost was not the power to harm children or the ability to stuff a religion down their throats; it was fear. Schools lost an aura, a symbol. Schools lost fear.
Parents, at one point in the distant past were on the side of the teacher. The advent of the Great American Lawsuit has seen that time pass. Students no longer earn grades; they are disseminated by mean spirited teachers who are out to ruin the futures of their students, the ones to which they have dedicated their entire lives. There is no respect.
Couple hyper kids you cannot realistically subdue or coerce into a seat with an education system that moves infinitely faster than it did in previous decades and ever-swelling class sizes and the product is stimulants. No part of an educational system should require drug use to participate, especially drugs that chemically resemble illegal street drugs such as cocaine and methamphetamine and produce similar effects. Especially not pre-school.
"It is conservatively estimated that 3 percent to 5 percent of our school-age population is affected by ADD." The discrepancy between the approximations of those medicated and those affected places the misdiagnoses rate at breathtaking. My primary message is to the future parents of America's children: you, UConn. If you let your teachers and doctors tell you that your child is the problem and not the school you are perpetuating crimes against future generations. For what are we trading in our children's lives?
Sources:
[1] http://www.breggin.com/ritalinconfirmingthehazards.html
[2] http://pediatrics.about.com/cs/adhd/a/adderall.htm
[3] http://www.kidsource.com/kidsource/content2/add.html
[4] http://www.adhdhelp.org/stimulants.htm
[5] http://www.entrepreneur.com/mag/article/0,1539,228256,00.html
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