Another mass shooting – and as predictably as Joe Biden doing something inappropriate around little girls – we have calls to terminate the freedoms of law-abiding citizens. Now red flag laws are all the rage. Those would be the laws that encourage neighborhood “Karens” to send the police to confiscate guns from friends, family, and maybe even total strangers – based on nothing more than their perceived concern. What could possibly go wrong? But what if there were something other than guns that we should be confiscating? Like say, prescription medications.
The NRA has noted that an alarmingly high number of mass shooters have also been on psychotropic drugs. In 2017, The Citizens Commission on Human Rights raised its own red flag. It also noted an alarming correlation between violence and mind-altering drugs – like those used to treat depression, bi-polar disorder, and ADHD (attention deficit hyperactive disorder). Its report on the topic included a disturbing list of violent offenders, and the drugs they had been prescribed. The report even noted that Stephen Paddock (the Las Vegas mass shooter) had been on diazepam which has been linked to aggression, violence, homicidal ideation, and suicide.
Matt Powell of Manchester, CT did a bit of his own sleuthing. He compiled a list of violent offenders and the drugs they were prescribed. The list includes 12 active shooters (including the Columbine shooting), 9 suicides, and 12 assorted homicides whose perpetrators were on some psychotropic drug.
I understand all of the disclaimers. Correlation is not causation. Anecdotes do not constitute scientific proof. Yada, yada, yada.
The NIH and the CDC also insist there is no proof of a link between prescription drugs and mass shootings. That would be the same folks that told us COVID vaccines are safe and effective (they’re not) – and then received secret royalties from the pharmaceutical companies. Sorry, the NIH and CDC have blown their credibility. It should be some time before we believe them about anything.
In the 1990s doctors went crazy diagnosing kids with ADHD. During that decade the students under treatment for ADHD ballooned from under 5 percent to over 11 percent. For some unknown reason, we experienced an epidemic of ADHD sufferers. Over 6.4 million children were being given mind altering drugs. That should concern us. Drugging our children could have any number of long-term effects – none of them good. I believe a large number of children were unnecessarily medicated. I saw it myself. A doctor suggested medicating one of our children, based on nothing more than the opinion of a teacher.
When our son was 7, we were contacted for a parent/teacher conference – this can’t be good. His second-grade teacher started the meeting by informing us that our son was among her students who had “special needs” – nope, not good at all. She went on to explain that he had ADHD. She didn’t say she suspected it. She didn’t say she was concerned about it. She said he had it. She further informed us that he needed medication to correct the condition. Alarm 1: non-medical professionals recommending medication.
We scheduled our son for an evaluation by a medical specialist. The doctor subjected our son to a battery of tests to determine if he in fact suffered from ADHD. After a couple of hours of testing, we were called in to discuss the results. The doctor informed us that our son was in the normal range. He then handed us a prescription for Ritalin. Alarm 2: medical professionals defaulting to medication when the testing doesn’t justify it.
I was confused. If our son was in the normal range, why the prescription? The Doctor informed us that in spite of the test results, he was diagnosing our son with ADHD. We were beginning to smell a rat. I pointed out that our son scored in the normal range on his tests. What’s the point of using a test, if you’re just going to ignore the results? That’s when the doctor let the secret out of the bag. He said, “Well, we put a lot of emphasis on what the teachers say.” Alarm 3: their tests don’t mean anything. If the teacher wants her students doped out of their minds, the medical profession is happy to deliver.
That’s when I unloaded. “Your profession has a test for the condition, which you administer, and then ignore if the results don’t comport with what his teacher says – who isn’t a medical professional? And you want to put a prepubescent boy on mind altering drugs in response to that non-professional diagnosis?”
His chair must have been awfully uncomfortable, because he was starting to act like he wanted to be anywhere but in it. Looking for a way to squirm out of the corner he was in, he blurted out, “We could use a non-pharmaceutical approach!” My wife diplomatically stepped in, “Yes, let’s do that.”
He explained that we could use bio feedback to behaviorally train our son to be a better student. We’d have him carry a spiral notebook to school every day, and have the teacher score him from 1 to 5 – 5 being a perfect score, and 1 meaning he had run horribly off the rails that day. At the end of each day, we’d discuss the score with him and take appropriate action. No mind-altering drugs, no social stigma, just an opportunity to make him a better student. We were in.
We met with his teacher again and explained the plan. She was skeptical, but willing to give it a try. She would score him at the end of each day. Good scores would get him some extra time with his beloved video games. Poor scores would result in some remedial book time. And then things got weird.
For the next 6 months everybody stuck to the plan. Our son seemed to be learning how to comply with the teacher’s expectations. He would go for many days getting nothing but 4s and 5s. From time to time, his scores would drop into the 1s for a day or two, but oddly he hardly ever received 2s or 3s. In the teacher’s opinion, he was either exceptional or horrible – never anything in between.
What the doctor and teacher had failed to consider was that I am an engineer. Analyzing data is my thing. And I had 6 months of data to play with. I decided to calculate the mean, average, and standard deviation – because that’s what us geeks do. I started by plotting the scores on a timeline and discovered a pronounced rhythm. Our son’s scores would dip into the basement, every 28 days or so, just like clockwork. That level of regularity had to mean something.
I called my wife, “Honey, could you come and take a look at this?” She looked at my computer screen and burst into laughter. I wasn’t seeing it, but she was. It was a predictable rhythm all right. The time between the drops in score had a distinct period – rather like the type experienced by most post-puberty, pre-menopausal women. I had a run chart of the teacher’s menstrual cycles.
It’s an important consideration in engineering that when making measurements, one must consider the limitations of the measuring device. In this case, the measuring device was an adult human female. Someone not on the Supreme Court might consider her a woman. My measurements included both our son’s behavior, and the teacher’s mood – and her mood was subject to hormonal cycles. Needless to say, the experiment was over, and Ritalin was never again discussed in reference to our son.
But this begs some important questions. Are the people who wanted to medicate our son really the people that we want making red flag reports about firearms? Does this example not show the danger of making our liberty subject to the whims of someone having a bad day (or an ideology to push). Even if drugs are not causing violence, shouldn’t we be concerned about over-medicating developing minds? We still have no idea what the long-term effects might be.
As my wife and I learned, the industry has no medical checks and balances. If the teacher wants it, doctors are happy to “dope them up.” Unfortunately, the teachers want it a lot. It’s far easier to manage a room full of sleepwalking robots than a bunch of energetic kids.
How many children were needlessly prescribed mind-altering drugs because teachers had an occasional bad day, or were ill suited to cope with children being children?
If we have been over-medicating kids, what are the long-term ramifications? Judging by the biases displayed during COVID, I suspect the medical industry doesn’t know, because it doesn’t want to know – and therefore, hasn’t looked.
Chilling, no?
Author Bio: John Green is a political refugee from Minnesota, now residing in Idaho. He has written for American Thinker, American Free News Network, and The Blue State Conservative. He can be followed on Facebook or reached at greenjeg@gmail.com.
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Apart from the teachers practicing medicine without a license, I’ve had people point out that most of the same ‘symptoms’ that are used to diagnose ADHD strongly mirror the conditions for children that have vision problems. It seems weird to prescribe a Schedule 2 drug right along with: Morphine, Hydrocodone (Vicodin), Hyrdomorphone (Dilaudid), Oxycodone (OxyContin, Percocet), Meperidine (Demerol), Fentanyl, Methadone, Methamphetamine, Adderall, and Ritalin for something that might be an eye problem.
If we are giving our kids anything other than the standard childhood vaccines, we are over-medicating them.
I was in elementary school in the 60s, junior high (or whatever they call it now) in the early 70s. I don’t remember any classmates, specifically boys, who were “hyperactive” all the time. Once in a while, yes. Most of the time, no. Flash forward to mid-1980s when I was teaching. I had one kid who could not sit still. Did he have ADHD? I don’t know. I do know that he would not behave in any class. He was also the nephew and ward of the head of the school board (small independent district) who made no effort to discipline him. Flash forward a few more years to mid-2000s. I worked with a young woman who had a 4 year old daughter. A very active and imaginative 4 year old. She would regularly dose the kid with Benadryl at home so she would zone out and not be so active. It sounded to me like she was just a normal 4 year old, but what do I know? I definitely believe ADHD is over-diagnosed. I think some teachers and some parents are lazy and unwilling to discipline normally active kids when they won’t behave. It’s crazy that teachers have so much say in this diagnosis. As Tony mentioned, there are other factors that could be at play, vision that needs correcting or hearing that needs a boost, dyslexia that needs compensation and so on, all of which can result in disruptive behavior. Any doctor worth their salt would investigate every possible avenue and rule them out before seriously looking at ADHD. Unfortunately, there are far too many who do not.
I agree. People today, and that includes pretty much everybody today, have lost the art of teaching children social skills, including those necessary for them to be able to learn. I also think that our teachers are lacking the discernment necessary to figure out how to control a group of children or a classroom with activities designed to channel the energy that we all hope our children bring into the classroom.
I used to teach and one of the earliest lessons I learned was that it was up to me to keep the group, or groups, calmed by directed activity. When I lost my own focus and intention the classroom, or a few kids, would start to ramp up and start spiraling out of control so my job was to pay attention to those signs, accept that a misbehaving classroom was on me, and have some activities, sometimes fun other times learning oriented, in my hip pocket that I could pull out and wrench back control.
I’m not a dictator, although I am stern and discerning, but I care and if kids misbehave it’s on the adult in the room (or those keeping them from doing their jobs and I can say that I’ve never lost control of a room, or myself in the room, and I’ve never, ever, ever had the idea of drugging a child because I can’t maintain control of a room enter my mind.
It started earlier and is worse… one of my 4-F’s is that as a kid in the ’80s, before we really had a working understanding of high-functioning autism, I was misdiagnosed with ADHD and force-fed Ritalin… quietly stopped taking the crap as soon as I could and now get to deal with the complications for the rest of my life, like having to disprove the false-DX to the satisfaction of “Answer is ALWAYS ‘No!'” FAA to pursue pilot creds. Does not matter that I have hundreds of hours of sound Aeronautical Decision Making in the sim, everything from Cessnas to 747s including types no longer in existence, “our dogma trumps your facts.”
The way I see it is that, once, there was a child who was a little hyper in the classroom. He got a label placed on his head. A movie “Rain Man” is a box office hit, because it portrays a man with autism. Then, and it takes a few years, but the medical community decides to broaden the definition of autism, to the point of calling it a “spectrum disorder”. Like Tony said, teachers become doctors and force kids on Ritalin, because those teachers won’t do their jobs and love to sidestep cultural and moral issues that all affect the schools.
So, we didn’t have the problem when I was also in the public schools, like LizzierVGS, so just what is the real problem?
I think there is a problem, but I don’t believe it is anywhere near being something to just try to fix by drugs.
There’s a lot more to this so-called “spectrum disorder”, like how kids are raise, what they eat, how long they are baby sat by the television and computer game console.
So yeh, I think we are over medicating our kids, big time, with that one problem, that I see as an excuse to make another victim. I don’t believe all these kids were born like this.