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Ritalin: The new violence: America's kids are victims of menticide
by Michele Steinberg
Printed in the Executive Intelligence Review, March 24, 2000
There is nothing accidental about the ``new violence'' sweeping America, in
which children are killing each other, their parents, and themselves. Creating
killer kids using Nintendo techniques and animated violence is a
multimillion-dollar business, and it is deliberate.
Babies under a year old are being prescribed Ritalin to keep them quiet, and
the insane craze of Pokémon, or Pocket Monsters, as the Japanese-created
animated hit is known, is being investigated for causing photosensitive
epilepsy.
Indeed, the ``new violence'' has reached the level of a national emergency.
Recently, in little more than a week, the nation witnessed a wave of child
shootings and killings. The Feb. 28 shooting of a six-year-old girl, by another
six-year-old, in their Flint, Michigan schoolyard, was immediately followed by
the non-fatal shooting of a classmate by a seven-year-old, who learned to load
and shoot a gun from viewing television. That was followed by a rash of teenage
killings and shootings at schools throughout the country.
Democratic Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche has been the only
national leader to address this emergency, and offer a way out of it. On Feb.
25, LaRouche called for the formation of a ``National Commission Against the
New Violence,'' and pledged that his campaign will continue to shine a
spotlight on the growing crisis of media-induced violence in many facets of
American life.
The issue of the ``new violence'' was also addressed in a Feb. 20 speech to the
Schiller Institute-International Caucus of Labor Committees Presidents' Day
conference in Virginia, by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the wife of Lyndon LaRouche and
founder of the Schiller Institute (see last week's EIR). In her speech,
entitled ``America's Children Are in Mortal Danger,'' Zepp-LaRouche zeroed in
on Pokémon, which addicts children as young as two or three years of age.
Pokémon, she warned, has been underestimated as a trigger for violence, a an
instrument for desensitizing children to violence, and for actually encouraging
sadistic violence against others.
A study published in the March 2000 issue of Nature Neuroscience reports that
Pokémon is being investigated for links to visually induced epileptic seizures.
According to the article, ``During a recent showing of the `Pocket Monster'
cartoon in Japan, 685 children experienced epileptic seizures.'' It says that
``photosensitive epilepsy'' is the most common form of stimulus-induced
epilepsy, and its prevalence in children ages 4-14, which is already
``substantial, ... is increasing as a result of the proliferation of television
display units and video games which may act as triggers.'' More than 200
children who suffered epileptic convulsions during the Pokémon showing remained
hospitalized for some period of time, says the article.
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- Nintendo killers -
Speaking to Hispanic-American leaders on March 3, which was simultaneously
broadcast on his website (www.larouchecampaign.org), LaRouche stressed the
importance of the commission against the new violence:
``As most of you know,'' he said, ``something which should be of concern to
people, not only in the United States, but outside: We've had a pattern of
incidents, triggered to attention, not only by the Columbine shooting in the
Columbine High School in Colorado some time ago, but also by the case of a
shooting of an unarmed student [Amidou Diallo], near his home--entering his
home--by police, in the Bronx in New York. And this case was just decided in
favor of the police in a criminal proceeding which was moved out of New York
City into Albany.
``...|We're getting killings which are caused by the use of Nintendo-style
games, such as the game Pokémon, with children, and also with police and
others. In the case of the Diallo shooting, the problem was that the Mayor of
New York, like many other officials, has been training the police force in
Nintendo-style killing techniques.... So we have Nintendo-killers.''
LaRouche emphasized that this is what happened in Columbine: ``We have Nintendo
game-style killings which are occurring, from students. This affects young
people three years of age and higher. So, what's happening throughout the
United States: We're building up a recruitment of mass killers through
Nintendo-style games broadcast on the television stations, broadcast on the
Internet, and broadcast in the form of games, which people can buy through
video stores and game stores.
``This is a very serious problem. It is the result of the mass media programs.
We are producing zombies from our students, by this means, and by the use of
Ritalin and other dangerous drugs in classrooms, to try to control student
populations.''
LaRouche called for the formation of the commission after the verdict in the
Diallo case, in which the four policemen who killed Diallo, firing 41 shots at
him in five seconds, were acquitted, on Feb. 25.
In his March 3 webcast, LaRouche stressed that the police who killed Diallo,
were responding ``as they had been trained'' to do. So, to get at the cause of
the violence, LaRouche said, go after the incompetent and evil leaders
responsible.
``We must eliminate the kind of public official, especially elected officials,
responsible elected officials, who will allow the kind of training and
directives which are being given by [New York Mayor Rudolf] Giuliani, or by
George W. Bush in Texas, or Jeb Bush in Florida, or [James] Gilmore, the
Governor of Virginia,'' LaRouche said. ``We must eliminate those kinds of
people from positions of power, and put in and demand, as a qualification, that
the people who go in, are the kind of people who know what to do with this kind
of problem.
``If we don't, we can only blame ourselves. And I'm determined to do everything
I can, with my campaign and in other ways, to deal with this problem. This has
come to a danger point, where ... we are faced with a kind of violence this
nation can not survive, unless we bring it under control. And therefore, it has
almost the highest priority, among all world issues, in bringing this under
control.''
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- Ban Ritalin and the rest -
It is well known that many of the student mass murderers were being prescribed
mind-altering psychiatric drugs. T.J. Solomon, the 15-year-old from Conyers,
Georgia who shot six classmates in May 1999, was on Ritalin; Eric Harris, 18
years old, the Columbine killer, was being prescribed the anti-depressant
Luvox; and Kip Kinkel, the 15-year-old from Springfield, Oregon who killed both
parents, two schoolmates, and wounded 20 other students on May 21, 1998, was
being prescribed Prozac, one of the most widely prescribed among the
anti-depressants.
These are not isolated cases. Of the estimated 2 million kids under 18 years of
age in America who have been prescribed Ritalin, Luvox, Prozac, Paxil, and
other anti-depressants and psychiatric drugs, many have committed violent acts,
even killings. Many others are walking time-bombs.
On March 6, U.S. News & World Report documented other cases of violence
connected to these type of drugs. In 1995, in California, 16-year-old Jarred
Viktor was convicted of first-degree murder for stabbing his grandmother 61
times. Ten days earlier, Jarred had been prescribed the anti-depressant Paxil,
for his pre-existing problems--drinking, drug abuse, and threatening suicide.
The article reports how 13-year-old Matt Miller committed suicide in Kansas (he
was found hanging in his closet) after taking the anti-depressant Zoloft for a
week. The Miller family has filed suit against Pfizer, the manufacturer of
Zoloft.
Articles in the U.S. magazine Health and Healing, and in the British daily, the
Observer, charge that Prozac, produced by Eli Lilly company, has the effect of
producing akathisia, a condition of severe agitation and disorientation, which
they describe as a fuse for violent outbursts. A study conducted by Dr. David
Healy, director of the North Wales Department of Psychological Medicine at the
University of Wales, found that Prozac produced violent behavior in mentally
healthy volunteers, and claims the drug may have been the trigger for many
violent acts, including murders for which people are in prison.
But by far the most horrible revelation to date is the documentation that
increasing numbers of infants, toddlers, and pre-school children are being
zombified with psychiatric drugs produced for adults, before these children can
even learn to talk, let alone read.
According to an article in the Feb. 23 Journal of the American Medical
Association, entitled ``Trends in the Prescribing of Psychotropic Medications
to Pre-Schoolers,'' poor children, especially black children in the United
States, are being prescribed the dangerous drug Ritalin (methylphenidate) in
unprecedented numbers, at younger and younger ages, with the number of
prescriptions having increased more than 300% during 1991-95 in two study
groups. The use of Prozac (fluoxetine hydrochloride) is just as abused; the
article says that a psychiatric newsletter, citing marketing data compiled by
the Food and Drug Administration, reported that in 1994, some 3,000
prescriptions for fluoxetine hydrochloride were written for children younger
than one year of age!
The article was written by a group of doctors led by Dr. Judy Magno Zito, from
the University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, and the Center for Health
Research, Kaiser Permanente, in Portland, Oregon, and the findings were
presented already in May 1999, at a meeting of the American Psychiatric
Association in Washington, D.C. But, the dangerous practices have still not
stopped.
The physicians studied ambulatory care prescription records from 1991 to 1995
from two state Medicaid programs (one in a Midwest state, and one in a
Mid-Atlantic state), and from one salaried ``group-model'' health maintenance
organization (HMO) in the Northwest. The records were checked for enrollees
between 2 and 4 years old (all pre-school) during those years in three
cross-sections for the years 1991, 1993, and 1995.
The results should shock the nation: In all three programs, psychotropic
medications prescribed for pre-schoolers increased dramatically. The use of
methylphenidate increased in all three sites: threefold for the Midwest
database, 1.7-fold for the Mid-Atlantic group, and 3.1-fold at the HMO. These
records involved hundreds of thousands of patients--there were more than
158,000 enrolled in the Midwestern state, 54,237 in the Mid-Atlantic state, and
19,322 at the HMO. One noticeable pattern is the prevalence of prescribing
these drugs for poor children. The article says that the Medicaid youth
populations were almost entirely eligible under Aid to Families with Dependent
Children (AFDC, the Federal welfare program, which has since been replaced by
the state-by-state welfare administration, TANF), and, within the Medicaid
groups, ``non-whites were over-represented,'' i.e., a greater number than in
the general population of the country.
There's no question that the poorest children are being abused. The article
also notes that, ``in a 1998 professional meeting report, pediatric researchers
noted that 57% of 223 Michigan Medicaid enrollees aged younger than 4 years
with a diagnosis of ADHD [Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder] received at
least one psychotropic medication to treat this condition.'' Among the drugs,
methylphenidate was one of the two most often prescribed.
These results are more than alarming: They indicate a pattern of pre-meditated
medical abuse of children. At a press conference on March 3, Sen. Chris Dodd
(D-Conn.) addressed the ``concerns'' posed by the Journal of the American
Medical Association article. Dodd displayed wall charts that showed the warning
labels that are printed on every bottle of Ritalin. In large type, the inserts
say: ``Warning: Ritalin should not be used in children under six years, since
safety and efficacy in this age group have not been established.'' A second
warning says: ``Precautions: long-term effects of Ritalin in children have not
been well-established.''
Dodd had sponsored legislation in 1997 requiring that this type of warning be
provided, and that pediatric drugs be tested before being prescribed to
children. He bemoaned the slowness of the process, and admitted that doctors
who are prescribing these drugs are ``playing Russian roulette with the
health'' of these children. At the same time, Dodd praised the ``useful''
aspects of these psychotropic drugs on troubled children, and called upon the
National Institutes of Health to ``speed up'' the research so that the drugs
could be cleared for use on children.
He's wrong. The use of psychotropic drugs for children should be banned, now.
The preceding article is a rough version of the article that appeared in The
Executive Intelligence Review. It is made available here with the permission of
The Executive Intelligence Review. Any use of, or quotations from, this article
must attribute them to The New Federalist, and The Executive Intelligence
Review