Big Pharma Bribes Doctors to Hook Your Kids on Drugs

By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet. Posted July 17, 2009.

"The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike." –Ralph Waldo Emerson

The wave of evil washes not only the financial-industrial complex, the military-industrial complex, the energy-industrial complex, and predatory executives at AIG, Citibank, Halliburton, Blackwater/Xe, Enron, and Exxon. The pharmaceutical-industrial complex has virtually annexed the mental health profession, whose all-star opportunist team is captained by Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, the high-profile doctor most responsible for the explosion of kids on psychiatric drugs, first for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and then for bipolar disorder.

In 2008, Biederman was nailed by Congressional investigators for taking $1.6 million from drug makers from 2000 to 2007 and failing to report most of this loot to his university, a major conflict of interest in violation of the rules. In a February 26, 2009 deposition given by Biederman to several states attorneys (who were claiming that makers of antipsychotic drugs defrauded state Medicaid programs by improperly marketing their medicines), Biederman was asked what rank he held at Harvard.

"Full professor," Biederman answered.

"What’s after that?" asked one state attorney, Fletch Trammell.

"God," Biederman responded.

"Did you say God?" Trammell asked.

"Yeah," Biederman said.

As part of this legal proceeding, Biederman was forced to provide documents relating to his interactions with Johnson & Johnson, the giant pharmaceutical company. These documents included presentations he made over several years summarizing the work of his center financed by Johnson & Johnson. On March 20, 2009, the New York Times reported that Biederman pitched Johnson & Johnson that his proposed research studies on its antipsychotic drug Risperdal would turn out favorably for Johnson & Johnson -- and then Biederman delivered the goods. The Times also reported that in 2005 Biederman proposed a study on adolescents using the ADHD-drug Concerta, manufactured by Johnson & Johnson, and he assured the company that his study would "extend to adolescents positive findings with Concerta." And in 2006, Biederman was co-author of a study showing that children given Concerta for a prolonged period did not have reduced growth, allaying a significant concern about the medicine -- but in contradiction to what has now been established.

For decades, the majority of American doctors, mental health professionals, the media, and the general public have yielded to the disseminations of Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Biedeman who successfully evangelized for more children -- and younger children -- to be medicated with powerful psychiatric drugs.

The blowback from ADHD drugs is reported in the current July 2009 Scientific American Mind article "Do ADHD Drugs Take a Toll on the Brain?" a comprehensive report of the long-term dangers of ADHD drugs such as Ritalin, Concerta, Adderall, and Vyvanse.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimated in 2005 that 9% of boys and 4% of girls in the U.S. were taking ADHD stimulant medications; and according to a 2007 study, ADHD-drug prescriptions rose by almost 12 percent a year between 2000 and 2005.

ADHD drugs are either the "amphetamine-like" methylphenidate (e.g., Ritalin and Concerta) or actual amphetamines (e.g., Adderall and Vyvanse), so it should not be surprising that long-term use is associated with many hazards. The current Scientific American Mind piece, authored by Edmund S. Higgins, clinical associate professor of family medicine and psychiatry at the Medical University of South Carolina states, "Methylphenidate has a chemical structure similar to that of cocaine and acts on the brain in a very similar way." In February 2009, neuroscientists at the Rockefeller University reported cocaine-like structural and chemical alterations in the brains of mice given methylphenidate.

See more stories tagged with: drugs, big pharma, adhd, amphetamines, joseph biederman

Bruce E. Levine, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and author of Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy (Chelsea Green, 2007).

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