At the risk of offending women in general and black women specifically I have undertaken the task of destroying a commonly held myth by both whites and blacks. This myth has so permeated our collective conscious that it is often depicted in story and movie. This mythical black woman is often times portrayed as some super human single black mother who has overcome tremendous obstacles to raise her family despite the odds. It has given way to the belief by many that black women have some inherent strength or ability that allows them to be able to raise children successfully without men. The danger of this myth is that because of it today many black women are choosing to do precisely that. They have accepted and fostered this false belief to the point that many look at men as merely sperm donors and have no expectations of their presence in the lives of their children. Let me state unequivocally and without wavering the experiment of women raising children by themselves has failed and failed miserably.
Due to the fact that so many men have allowed themselves to be silenced by feminists today any male that in any way calls into question a woman’s desire to give birth, raise, and fail her children is considered a chauvinist. Because we have allowed women to frame the arguments surrounding family, children, and reproduction men no longer have any opportunity to take part in the discussions or analysis of these issues. Despite the propaganda of some women and the lack of concern by so-called news organizations the evidence is clear. The vast majority of children raised in single women head of households are suffering and as a result the society at large is suffering. The society is suffering because not only do these children create social problems, but this lifestyle is growing throughout our society. Granted divorce is playing a larger and larger role in our society and creating a large number of these homes, but what is also playing a major role is the desire of women to have children without the expectation of having men in the lives of their children.
To me for a woman to deliberately have children without the expectation of having the father in that child’s life is the epitome of selfishness. With all of the empirical data we now have concerning the ill-effects of such a household on the great majority of our children it would be considered unconscionable for anyone but a woman to consider such a choice. I don’t agree with the logic that many of these children are accidents or mistakes of reckless people. If you make a mistake and have a child under these conditions that is one thing, but if you have multiple children from multiple men then this is no longer a mistake it is a lifestyle choice. The evidence is clear that not only is this detrimental to our children’s well being, but also to our nation’s well being. It is not about a woman being strong enough to raise children alone. An example would be if I break the doorknob on my door and I use some rope to open and close the door, granted that would work but that is not how the door was designed to work. No matter how I would like for it to be otherwise the fact remains I am making the best out of a bad situation. Young women who are raised in fatherless homes make up 85% of the future single unwed mothers so we are perpetuating the education, crime, and social problems into generation after generation. The proof is that in the 1960’s 20% of all black children were being raised in single mother households; today that number is almost 70%.
In spite of the rare success stories that we see on the television the truth is that most of these children grow up in and remain in poverty, they are poorly educated, and prone to criminal activity. We hear about the 15% that are successful and ignore the 85% who are not. Imagine if at your job you were 85% wrong about whatever it is you do and then not only were you not terminated but you were promoted as a success story. Black women are not genetically or culturally disposed to be able to withstand the rigors of raising children alone, no woman is. The sad part is that this is not a problem of poor or teenage women, but a choice being made by older women. The majority of new unwed mothers are women over 21. We have turned having a baby into a fashion accessory or a substitute for missing intimacy.
There will be those who criticize me for "picking" on the women, but let’s be honest women have always driven the reproduction and repopulation of the species. It was the morals of women in the 1960’s that had the rate at 20% not the morals of men. There will be those who say black women don’t have the requisite number of potential partners and my answer to that is that if black women are doing such a good job of raising these young men why are there not enough good men? Are there other external reasons for the lack of good black male suitors? Of course there is. There is racism, there is systemic marginalization of black men, and there is lack of economic development. The problem is simply this and it hasn’t changed since 1960, until we begin to stabilize our families and provide a healthy environment for our children to develop the tools they need for success all the integration, money, and opportunity won’t make a bit of difference. If we open up a door and our kids are not prepared to go through it then we all fail.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
The Myth of the Super Black Woman
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Americans, We Can Do Anything
One of my earliest memories -- going with my grandfather to see some of the astronauts being brought back after a splashdown, sitting on his shoulders and waving a little American flag. And my grandfather would say, boy, Americans, we can do anything when we put our minds to it." – Barack Obama
One of the most often quoted and I think one of the most profound moments in President Barack Obama’s life is this memory he has of him and his grandfather watching an Apollo rocket splashdown after a space mission. What was it about this moment that transformed a skinny black kid into believing that he could be President of the United States? The difference I believe is the difference that separates us as a nation and us a culture. You see when we are young we all want to believe that we can do anything in this world that we want to do. The problem is that at some point our reality breaks with our dreams. Something happens where some of us stop believing that we can do anything. For some reason when an immigrant black or a white person tells their child that they can do anything, they actually believe it. Unfortunately, American blacks do not speak with that same conviction.
The reason Barack Obama was able to use that moment and take it with him from the island of his youth to the halls of power was because he believed what his grandfather told him. No matter as a parent what you tell your child, if that child does not believe that you believe what you say it will mean little to their lives. It is sort of like the parent smoking weed and telling the child not to do drugs; it sort of loses something in the translation. Many blacks born and raised in America when they speak of the opportunities provided by America to rise above one’s circumstances do not speak with that same conviction and our children have suffered for it. Unlike many today while I celebrate this historic inauguration of President Barack Obama, I wonder where the next black President will will come from. Will his inauguration challenge a new generation to believe that they too can rise above their circumstances and dare to dream? I think that regardless of what a parent may have suffered at the hands of a society it is incumbent upon that parent to stoke the flames of their children’s dreams and their ambitions. If not then all we pass along to our children is hopelessness and bitterness.
If we truly believe that we are Americans and we can do anything then let us use this historic time to ensure that the dreams of all of our children can be realized by providing learning and training opportunities for all of them. We must begin to provide real concrete evidence of change and not symbolic gestures. For too long opportunity has only been reserved for a limited few. We must expand opportunity to all who are willing to pursue it. Instead of providing tax-cuts and bonus money to those who don’t need it we should begin to use that money to elevate those children who believe that they have a better chance at becoming “Scarface” than they do becoming President. It will take a lot of time, money, and effort to reverse these frightening trends. However, beginning today we have an opportunity to affirm to the world and to all in our nation that America really does stand for all of those high ideals we claim it does. I wish I could say it will be easy, but it won’t. When times are hard we have a tendency to become selfish and want to reduce opportunities instead of expanding them. It is precisely this attitude that has gotten us into the position we are in now.
I hope that instead of trying to make America what it once was, we make America what it never was, but what it could have been. I arrive at today so very hopeful not just for my children, but for all of our children. I hope that today when I tell my son he can be whatever he wants to be, I can say it with conviction and that I can believe it.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Dropout Epidemic Fueled By NCLB
It appears that what was rumored by many concerning the No Child Left Behind legislation is being proven true. It was believed by many that one of the side effects of this legislation was that many struggling students were being pushed out of school by administrators in an effort to improve their school’s standing. And if they were not actively pushed to drop-out they were at least quietly allowed to disappear by administrators who were fearful of having their schools labeled as failing. The truth of the matter is that this legislation has fueled the leaving behind of millions of students.
Most troublesome to some experts was the way the No Child law’s mandate to bring students to proficiency on tests, coupled with its lack of a requirement that they graduate, created a perverse incentive to push students to drop out. If low-achieving students leave school early, a school’s performance can rise.
No study has documented that the law has produced such an effect nationwide. Experts say they believe many low-scoring students are prodded to leave school, often by school officials urging them to seek an equivalency certificate known as a General Educational Development diploma.
“They get them out so they don’t have them taking those tests,” said Wanda Holly-Stirewalt, director of a program in Jackson, Miss., that helps dropouts earn a G.E.D. “We’ve heard that a lot. It happens all over the system.”[1]
So rather than encouraging struggling students and providing them with the tools they need to improve, administrators are instead opting to have them removed from their rolls by coercion at worse and neglect at best. So the emphasis is no longer on education, but instead on scores and rankings. The NCLB legislation is just another smoke screen provided by politicians to help to enrich the wealthy at the expense of the poor and middle-class. One of the main routes to improvement in our society is through education. Public education should be one of our most important and well-funded endeavors as a society, however for some reason it is the least. How can this be? It can be because the way to ensure that the wealthy stay wealthy and that there is a large pool of unqualified and unskilled workers is by keeping public education poorly funded and poorly administered.
If we as a society truly valued the improvement of all of our citizens we would be investing the billions we are spending daily in Iraq and Afghanistan right here at home in the improvement of our schools for all Americans. The problem with this is that it would create too many well-educated people. Democracy may demand an educated population, but a well-educated population is the bane of the ruling-class. The same people who send their children to private or upper-echelon schools are the same ones who say we are spending too much money on public education. The best insurance for keeping the inadequacies of our society in place is a poorly funded public education system where the majority of students are poorly prepared for continued education. You would think that after billions of dollars and many studies later that we would have developed a system that actually works to educate the masses, but we have not. The reason we have not is because it is not a priority in our society. We talk about the benefits of education and raising the standards of our children, but the truth be told compared to other programs education is one of our least funded.
Even without the wars, education has never received the amount of funding or critical study necessary to produce adequately prepared students for the future. Rather than focusing in on education our system of education has focused in on conformity and assimilation. As Pink Floyd so adequately stated, “Another brick in the wall.” Another compliant worker bee to feed to the machine of commerce and capitalism has been our chief concern. Any child that does not meet the standard must be drugged or isolated and finally removed from the system. We have some pretty good ideas of what is wrong with the system, but we do not have the desire or the will to improve it. Year after year more and more of our greatest resource are allowed to slip and in some cases forced through the cracks.
I hope for our sakes that education will once gain become a priority not just for the wealthy, but for all of America’s children. We can not afford as a society to continue down the path we are on. As more and more of our children become uneducated they will begin to rebel against a system that has left them unprepared for the world and this rebellion will not be expressed in a positive way. We are at a crossroad in America. This election will determine the direction of this country for years to come. I hope instead of war, fear, and death we choose life and the future of our nation, which is our children. And that the words no child left behind will truly mean something.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/education/20graduation.html?pagewanted=2&hp
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
The Elevation of Mediocrity
There is a growing trend in America and it is sure to have profound effects for our future economic and technological viability. The trend is the practice of lowering expectations for our children and as a result ourselves. The practice is in effect “dumbing down” our society so that no one feels snubbed or not special. The goal is to make everyone feel equal, but the reality is that it is to make everyone the same. Making everyone feel the same is not the equivalent of everyone being equal. Let’s face it we are all created equal, but we do not all share the same gifts and talents. Instead of trying to amalgamate these differences, we need to be celebrating them.
The problem began when in an effort to lessen the effects of failure and defeat some genius came up with the idea that we would reward all children the same regardless of their performance. Win or lose everybody gets a trophy and regardless of your abilities everybody gets to play. If all children were in fact endowed with the same abilities in all the same areas, this would be a good idea; maybe. But the truth is not every child has the same abilities in all the same areas. There are some kids that excel in sports, while others may excel in music, and others in writing. For us to try to reduce these natural gaps in talents to keep our kids from experiencing loss is ill-conceived and just plain wrong. It is wrong for a number of reasons to not reward excellence when it is displayed whatever the venue.
Today we reward kids for their participation in an activity, basically for just showing up. Everyone gets a trophy no matter what their performance or effort. I find this attitude inconsistent with the goals of life. What these people don’t understand is that a child learns as much losing as he does winning and in many cases more. How will a child learn perseverance and dealing with defeat, if he never experiences it? Where is the incentive to get better or to work harder if you’ll be rewarded anyway? We are in effect removing the motivation for greatness so that we can reward mediocrity. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t seem fair to me.
The trophy backlash is part of what many experts see as a broader reaction to a culture of coddling. Some educators and psychologists argue that recent moves designed in part to build kids' self-esteem -- giving partial credit for incorrect math answers at school, for instance, or overlooking misspellings -- removes kids' incentives to push themselves. "If you are going to get an award anyway," says Jack Lesyk, a Beachwood, Ohio, psychologist who works with kids who play sports, "the message is you don't really have to try your best."[1]
If this were only about sports or other extracurricular activities that would be one thing, but this mentality has invaded academia. If you are a upper middle-class white person who is going to get accepted into college as a legacy, make C’s, and then be elected twice to be the President of America then this system is working, but for those of us with children that won’t have these advantages the last thing we want is for their inspiration to be dampened. Life for us is a struggle and always will be and we want our children to be prepared for that struggle. The way you prepare them for the struggle is not by coddling them or by lowering the standards. Many of the problems facing blacks as a community are from our kids, especially male children, being coddled by their mothers. Now they can’t even take someone insulting them without getting their feelings hurt and then wanting to shoot somebody.
We now, thanks to the “No Child Left Behind” charade are elevating mediocrity in education. With all the focus being placed on the children that are failing, the children that would have a chance to be exceptional are falling through the cracks. I wish we had recruiters in the inner-city that came around in grade school looking for academic superstars instead of the athletic ones. Do you know that many of our young athletes are recruited and offered scholarships to prestigious prep-schools for athletic prowess while still in elementary school, but none of these fine institutions are providing the same for academics. It is no wonder our kids are more focused on sports than education, these are the ones getting the rewards and accolades.
I’m sorry folks but the truth is the truth and the truth is simply this. Not everyone is as smart as me, as strong as me, or as handsome as me, but by the same token I am not as smart, strong, or handsome as some other people. It’s called life and in life sometimes you fail and sometimes you succeed. We all have to learn to live with our failures as much as with our successes. The thing about elevating mediocrity is that not only do you remove the stigma of failure, but you also remove the gratification for true success. My greatest triumphs came on the heels of defeats and failures. By elevating mediocrity, we have removed the incentive to strive for greatness.
The report challenges the conventional wisdom that cream will always rise to the top. And because the federal No Child Left Behind Act focuses on raising the performance of the lowest achievers to a baseline level known as "proficiency," there is little help for high achievers who fade over time. As this report shows, the odds are that such a "fader" student comes from a lower-income household. Little accountability exists under federal law for the academic performance of these high-achieving lower-income students. This needs to change.[2]
I wouldn’t have a problem with the theory behind NCLB, but what has happened is that in order to qualify and meet the arbitrary standards set by a group whose sole goal has been the destruction of the public school system, we have lowered the standards and spent so much emphasis on raising the lower end of the scale that the upper end is withering and dying. We cannot afford to allow our most gifted to die on the vine due to a lack of stimulus and support. We now have gifted kids having to struggle to stay engaged while marginal students are taking most of the attention and focus of the instructors. The schools are forced to spend so much time and resources on standardized tests that no real learning is allowed to take place. We are developing a population of little automatons they are able to retrieve rote information, but what about independent thought and problem solving skills?
[1] http://www.contemporaryfamilies.org/subtemplate.php?t=inTheNews&ext=news023
[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/13/AR2007111301466.html
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
America Eats Its Young
As part of our “get tough” on crime initiatives, the US imprisons more people, gives the death penalty to children, and gives children life without parole. Remember this was designed to stem the new diabolical child criminals we were going to be seeing following the crack and meth epidemics. These kids were supposed to be so violent and so spiritually flawed that prison for life and the death penalty were the only solutions for them. I have never understood why the US continues to support this “lock em up” and throw away the key mentality when none of the so-called crises ever manifest themselves. Where are these ultra-violent juveniles who are suppose to be stalking our streets and invading our homes?
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — In December, the United Nations took up a resolution calling for the abolition of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for children and young teenagers. The vote was 185 to 1, with the United States the lone dissenter.
Indeed, the United States stands alone in the world in convicting young adolescents as adults and sentencing them to live out their lives in prison. According to a new report, there are 73 Americans serving such sentences for crimes they committed at 13 or 14.[1]
Many studies suggest that juveniles are not more violent, the statistics are being driven by juveniles having more access to guns, which is driving the rise in the statistics. Because so many more of our youth are carrying guns, these youths are committing more violent acts, but the number of violent youths has not substantially increased. I remember there was a young man in Chicago who made magazine covers and newspapers all over the country, this young man became the face of the new pre-teen killers. His name was Robert "Yummy" Sandifer, he was the 11 year old who was accused of killing a fourteen year old girl in a gang shooting cross-fire mishap. This child was going to usher in the new wave of violence perpetrated by these pre-teen psychopaths.
Once again playing to the fears and prejudices of the population, politicians were able to push through legislation in many states allowing for the death penalty or life in prison without the possibility of parole for children as young as 13. If you allow crime to fester in neighborhoods by providing insufficient resources and an attitude of indifference towards the victims, naturally there will be frustration and a call to get tough on these vicious children. It will always be easier to deal with the aftermath of crime than to deal with the systemic issues that create it. The fact that there are way too many guns in America and it is too easy for kids to get them, the fact that too many of our children are being allowed to become invisible and slip through the cracks of our social service nets, or the fact that too many of the parents of these children are either incapable or unable to provide the emotional, physical, or financial support to sustain these kids.
Are we willing to say to children that their lives are over at 13? Are we a nation that will fight for a child only up until the time it is born? As more and more of our children are becoming at-risk for not only being victims, but also for being perpetrators are we willing to marshal the necessary forces and resources to rescue them or will we continue to turn a blind eye to those least able to protect themselves. Are there some children who have been so damaged by their life’s circumstances to be beyond redemption? Maybe, but we owe it to our children to provide them with every chance to become rehabilitated. Remember, no one is born a cold-blooded killer. Each child comes into this world an empty vessel, we want to pollute the vessel and then cast it aside to rot in some dudgeon so we don’t have to admire our handiwork. At least the rest of the world is willing to try to repair the damage society has done to its most vulnerable members, we unfortunately do not share that ideal.
Every child destroyed by our society is an indictment against all of us. Yet in the best of situations we dump them off at malls with little or no supervision or at worst we leave them to raise themselves while we pursue our own selfish pleasures of drug and alcohol abuse. We expect them to behave like little robots and if they don’t we pump them full of psychotropic drugs to regulate their moods. We promote youth in our culture as a trait to be valued and envied, yet we sacrifice our children so we can continue to feed the machine that is American culture. Yes, America eats its young through inattentiveness, selfishness, and moral deficiency.
In its sentencing of juveniles, as in many other areas, the legal system in the United States goes it alone. American law is, by international standards, a series of innovations and exceptions. From the central role played by juries in civil cases to the election of judges to punitive damages to the disproportionate number of people in prison, the United States is an island in the sea of international law.
In defending American policy in this area in 2006, the State Department told the United Nations that sentencing is usually a matter of state law. “As a general matter,” the department added, juvenile offenders serving life-without-parole terms “were hardened criminals who had committed gravely serious crimes.”[2]
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/us/17teenage.html
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/us/17teenage.html
Friday, May 11, 2007
Drug Wars III
In my ongoing discussions of the drug policy in America, I have come across some very disturbing information concerning our children, doctors, and pharmaceutical companies. I briefly talked about the relationship in Drug Wars II, but there are reports that doctors on the pharmaceutical payroll are now prescribing drugs for our children that were not tested or designed for the purposes they are being prescribed.
The information is from Minnesota, the only state by the way that forces doctors to disclose where their income is coming from, and shows a correlation between the amounts of money doctors are receiving from the pharmaceutical companies and the number of prescriptions being written by the doctors. The pharmaceutical companies pay doctors to hold “educational” meetings to discuss their products and how to prescribe them, which seems harmless enough. However, the fees charged for these meetings may actually be concealed payments to the doctors from the pharmaceutical companies, which is in violation of the law. It is illegal for pharmaceutical companies to directly pay doctors for prescribing specific products and against Federal rules for the companies to promote unapproved uses for the products.
“From 2000 to 2005, drug maker payments to Minnesota psychiatrists rose more than sixfold, to $1.6 million. During those same years, prescriptions of antipsychotics for children in Minnesota’s Medicaid program rose more than ninefold.
Those who took the most money from makers of atypicals tended to prescribe the drugs to children the most often, the data suggest. On average, Minnesota psychiatrists who received at least $5,000 from atypical makers from 2000 to 2005 appear to have written three times as many atypical prescriptions for children as psychiatrists who received less or no money.
But studies present strong evidence that financial interests can affect decisions, often without people knowing it.
In Minnesota, psychiatrists collected more money from drug makers from 2000 to 2005 than doctors in any other specialty. Total payments to individual psychiatrists ranged from $51 to more than $689,000, with a median of $1,750. Since the records are incomplete, these figures probably underestimate doctors’ actual incomes.
Such payments could encourage psychiatrists to use drugs in ways that endanger patients’ physical health, said Dr. Steven E. Hyman, the provost of Harvard University and former director of the National Institute of Mental Health. The growing use of atypicals in children is the most troubling example of this, Dr. Hyman said.
“There’s an irony that psychiatrists ask patients to have insights into themselves, but we don’t connect the wires in our own lives about how money is affecting our profession and putting our patients at risk,” he said.”[1]
It is apparent that money and medicine are creating an atmosphere that is endangering the health and welfare of many of our children. Many times these drugs have not been tested on children in clinical trials so no one really knows what the side-effects or outcomes will be with long term usage. Because so much of medicine is trial and error we are putting these children at grave risk by allowing them to be human guinea pigs for the pharmaceutical companies and unscrupulous doctors. Many of these drugs are being prescribed with little or no empirical or historical data that they even work for symptoms or illnesses they are being prescribed for. So often today people are looking for the magic pill or quick fix for an unruly or aggressive child and these doctors are promising the parents quick answers to what usually are very complex issues.
As a parent, I understand the desire to want your children to be healthy and happy. I couldn’t imagine the pain and suffering that some parents endure with children that have emotional issues, but there is a growing body of evidence that many of our children are being misdiagnosed and drugs are being improperly prescribed. Doctors are free to prescribe medication as they see fit and the majority of doctors do an excellent job, but just as there are those in my field that are looking for easy answers I am sure there are doctors doing the same. Of course it doesn’t hurt to make a little cash on the side either.
“The drug industry and many doctors say that these promotional lectures provide the field with invaluable education. Critics say the payments and lectures, often at expensive restaurants, are disguised kickbacks that encourage potentially dangerous drug uses. The issue is particularly important in psychiatry, because mental problems are not well understood, treatment often involves trial and error, and off-label prescribing is common.
Dr. Steven S. Sharfstein, immediate past president of the American Psychiatric Association, said psychiatrists have become too cozy with drug makers. One example of this, he said, involves Lexapro, made by Forest Laboratories, which is now the most widely used antidepressant in the country even though there are cheaper alternatives, including generic versions of Prozac.
“Prozac is just as good if not better, and yet we are migrating to the expensive drug instead of the generics,” Dr. Sharfstein said. “I think it’s the marketing.”
Some psychiatrists who advocate use of atypicals in children acknowledge that the evidence supporting this use is thin. But they say children should not go untreated simply because scientists have failed to confirm what clinicians already know.
“We don’t have time to wait for them to prove us right,” said Dr. Kent G. Brockmann, a psychiatrist from the Twin Cities who made more than $16,000 from 2003 to 2005 doing drug talks and one-on-one sales meetings, and last year was a leading prescriber of atypicals to Medicaid children.”[2]
It is a frightening thing that some doctors feel that it is ok to prescribe these drugs even without scientific evidence of their effectiveness. There have been too many cases and lawsuits where doctors have prescribed medication that had not been thoroughly tested or had been marketed with false test data and promises. We as parents must be vigilant in safeguarding our children’s health. It is ok to question the doctors and do research on the diagnosis they give. It is especially important to find out all the information you can on the drugs being prescribed for your children, being careful to investigate the side-effects and any clinical trial data that you can find. It is a lot of work, but it is becoming evident that if you don’t do it, no one else will.
Read more!Thursday, May 10, 2007
Drug Wars II
Last week, I wrote about how illegal drug usage has skyrocketed. There is another phenomenon taking place simultaneously. We are taking more prescription drugs than ever before. Some would have us believe that it is due to our being better able to diagnose and treat diseases. I am not so sure.
One in ten of our children are taking prescription drugs. Not just for treating diseases, the majority of them are taking a potent cocktail of psychiatric drugs for behavioral problems. For the first time ever spending for behavioral problems outpaced spending for antibiotics and asthma among children. One in twenty of our kids are taking more than three prescription drugs per day. There has been a 369% increase in spending on ADHD (Attention Deficit/Hyper Disorder) drugs for kids under five. That’s right, kids under 5! We are setting them up for a lifetime of drug dependency and we do not even know what the long term effects of these drugs are. We are already seeing an increase in suicides and violence in our young people. Not to mention the costs they will incur for a lifetime of drug therapy.
Are there children who have legitimate medical reasons for taking prescription medication? Of course there are, but from the numbers there appears to be a large number of doctors and parents that are using these medications for quick fixes. There are some doctors over prescribing these dangerous drugs and misdiagnosing these children. We are not even letting these children develop personalities before we begin to try to alter them with these psycho drugs, many of which were not even developed for or tested on children. We must be careful and more diligent in this area; the stakes are too high to just casually prescribe these medications.
American consumers spent nearly $100 billion on prescription drugs last year, more than double what the nation spent on drugs in 1990. That number seems astronomical to me, so I have to break it down in a form that I can understand. That would put us number 48 on the worldwide country GNP list. We spent more money on prescription drugs than three-fourths of the world made in GNP. Why do we need to take so many drugs? Are our lives any better with all these drugs? Has our medical care gotten better because of taking all these prescription drugs?
There are a few things that are crystal clear concerning prescription medication in recent years:
1) Most seniors are taking more than one prescription drug, with almost half taking three or more.
2) Children are becoming major consumers of prescription drugs, in some cases on par with their parents, depending on their age.
3) The policy of prescribing multiple drugs simultaneously has become standard practice for most medical doctors and hospitals.
On the one hand we condemn the use of recreational drugs in our society and criminalize it, however we have no problem with drug usage as long as it prescribed and distributed by “Big Pharma”. We go into the schools proclaiming the dangers of drugs at the same time every morning these same kids are standing in line to get their morning dose of “Ritalin” to make them feel better. So, it is okay to use drugs to feel better so long as they are the drugs we give you. Am I the only one who sees the inconsistency here?
Stumble It!