On Sunday, February 3, the front page of the The New York Times featured some brilliant reporting by Alan Schwarz about the misuse and abuse of the prescription drug Adderall, commonly prescribed for Attention Deficit Disorder. Schwartz tells the gripping and tragic story of one young man, Richard Fee, who, as the headline puts it, “drowned in a stream of prescriptions.”
If you haven’t read it, I urge you to online and do so as soon as you can. It’s a salutary tale of medical indifference and–to my eyes anyway–malpractice. And it’s a reminder of our culture’s dependence on pills and quick fixes.
It’s not until the last paragraph that the organization known as CHADD is mentioned, but the very mention of that organization brought back a wave of unpleasant memories. You see, we investigated ADD back in 1995, in a documentary for PBS called “ADD: A Dubious Diagnosis?” (You can watch it here.) In that film we followed the money trail and documented very clearly how the makers of Ritalin (that era’s Adderall) bought off CHADD with covert donations, and how CHADD did all it could to endorse and recommend Ritalin. CHADD even infiltrated the US Department of Education and managed to appear in some government Public Service Announcements, with CHADD leaders posing as ordinary parents.
Rest of the blog entry here
NY Times article on ADHD Medications & Amphetamines
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