The War Against Children of Color:
How the drugs, programs, and theories of the psychiatric
establishment are threatening America’s children with a medical ‘cure’
for violence. by Peter Breggin, M.D.
co-authored with Ginger Ross Breggin
Updated paperback published in 1998
In 1992, Dr. Peter Breggin and Ginger Ross Breggin inspired a national
campaign against the proposed federal "Violence Initiative," that aimed
at identifying inner-city children with alleged defects that would make
them violent when they reached adulthood. Many of the research plans,
which are still in operation, involve searching for a "violence gene,"
finding "biochemical imbalances," and intervening in the lives of
schoolchildren with psychiatric drugs.
This book is an updated version
of the Breggin's 1994 The War Against Children, with a new chapter that includes information on the federally funded fenfluramine studies done on inner city boys.(read about the study below...)
“Terrifying data conveyed in the calm and sober
voice of an experienced and respected physician and researcher. A
brilliantly controversial and, for me, uncomfortably persuasive
work — and a major addition to our understanding of racism as it
infiltrates our science and our culture.”
— Jonathan Kozol, author of Amazing Grace and Savage Inequalities
RECENT FDA DECISION HIGHLIGHTS
ETHICAL ISSUES
IN DRUG RESEARCH ON CHILDREN
by Peter R. Breggin, M.D.
April 21, 1998
The FDA has put the interests of drug companies and the psychiatric
research establishment ahead of those of America's children. It is time
for the public and concerned professionals to take a stand against unethical
pharmacological research on children.
First, these NIMH-funded studies at Columbia and Queens College
exemplify the growing trend to abuse and suppress children in the
name of psychiatric research, technology, and treatment. In a nation where
millions of children are being behaviorally controlled and subdued by means
of psychiatric drugs such as Ritalin, Dexedrine and Adderall, it is inevitable
that our most vulnerable groups of children will be subjected to especially
abusive drug experiments.
The April 22, 1998 issue of the New York Post carries a story
of utmost importance for the future of America's children: The FDA has
given permission to certain facilities to use the banned diet drug fenfluramine
for experimental research on children. The object of the research is to
identify biochemical markers and potential treatments for violence. This
is an aspect of the notorious violence initiative which we opposed and
wrote about in The War Against Children. The FDA's decision has
been discovered amid mounting controversy over ongoing experiments on children
in New York City involving fenfluramine.
The following comments are intended as an elaboration on a prior March
3, 1998 press release and background paper from the Center for the Study
of Psychiatry and Psychology concerning fenfluramine studies conducted
on children in New York City. Our criticisms have suddenly become even
more important in light of the FDA's determination to condone and to legitimize
further such research.
The Dangers of Fenfluramine
The children in the ongoing New York City studies were exposed
to fenfluramine, a drug used for weight control that was banned by the
FDA in 1997 for causing heart valve defects. However, the controversy concerning
these adverse effects extended back years in time before the experiments
on children. The drug was already known to be dangerous.
In addition to heart valve dangers, fenfluramine is neurotoxic, causing
the death of brain cells in animals at therapeutic dose levels. Fenfluramine
is a drug closely related to Ritalin (methylphenidate) and to Dexedrine
and Adderall (amphetamines). Animal research shows that it overstimulates
and then kills serotonergic brain cells. As early as 1989, controversy
was generated surrounding fenfluramine's documented severe neurotoxicity
(Barnes, DM. Neurotoxicity creates regulatory dilemma. Science 243:29-30,
1989).
Basic Ethical and Scientific Issues
These studies exemplify several dangerous trends in modern psychiatry,
including Hi Tech Child Abuse and Racism.
First, these NIMH-funded studies at Columbia and Queens College
exemplify the growing trend to abuse and suppress children in the
name of psychiatric research, technology, and treatment. In a nation where
millions of children are being behaviorally controlled and subdued by means
of psychiatric drugs such as Ritalin, Dexedrine and Adderall, it is inevitable
that our most vulnerable groups of children will be subjected to especially
abusive drug experiments.
Second, these NIMH-funded studies exemplify psychiatric and medical
racism at its worst. These doctors have been willing to use
poor black and Hispanic children to conduct medical experiments that they
could not have conducted on more affluent white children. These doctors
have taken advantage of these vulnerable children and their families in
order to further their own research interests and careers.
Third, while no drug company money is known to be involved in these
studies, the drug companies, including Novartis (the maker of Ritalin)
and Eli Lilly (the maker of Prozac) have been trying to expand their market
among children. This marketing decision to push more drugs on children
is at the heart of the research community's growing focus on drugs for
children. Fenfluramine studies that examine serotonin as a possible factor
in violence are especially important to drug companies such as Eli Lilly
who making drugs like Prozac which affect serotonin.
Fourth, these studies reflect the growing trend to mislead parents
about the dangers of psychiatric drugs. In a nation in which millions of
children are being drugged with stimulants and antidepressants without
their parents being told about the serious hazards, it is no surprise that
the parents of poor children and racial minorities would be misled, hoodwinked,
and coerced into accepting even more dangerous drug research on their children.
The Columbia study is particularly offensive in regard to informed consent.
The children were obtained through the Department of Probation. They are
the younger brothers of boys already involved in the criminal justice system.
Finding experimental subjects through the Department of Probation was in
itself an invasion of privacy and a misuse of the criminal justice system.
Asking the parents to subject their children to research on the face of
it was very coercive. To refuse, they had to risk the enmity of legal authorities
in control of their children.
Fifth, the study was of no potential benefit to the children.
In fact, it was demonstrated by NIMH studies published in 1989 (see below)
that fenfluramine, while having serious side effects, had no therapeutic
benefit whatsoever. Thus the children were given a dangerous drug of no
possible benefit to them. This is unethical under standard guidelines for
medical experimentation on children.
Sixth, the research was highly speculative and unlikely to produce any
positive result.
A Dangerous New Trend
This research represents a growing trend in the United States
to perform outrageous research on children. The Center for the Study of
Psychiatry and Psychology first became involved in these issues in 1972
when we discovered that black children as young as age five were having
psychosurgery performed on them at the University of Mississippi in Jackson
in order to control "hyperactive" and "aggressive"
behavior. Their brains were being implanted with electrodes that were heated
up to melt areas of the brain that regulate emotion and intellect. When
we first opposed these experiments, and eventually stopped them, we did
so despite resistance from organized psychiatry and the research community.
Twenty years later in 1992 we discovered the federal violence initiative--the
federal government's agency-wide plan to go into America's inner cities
to experiment on children in the hope of finding genetic and biological
causes for violence. We opposed this program as racist and abusive of children.
Our efforts led to the cancellation of this program. It also led the chief
sponsor of the program, psychiatrist Frederick Goodwin, to resign from
his post as director of NIMH and to leave a career in the government.
The fenfluramine studies at Columbia and Queens College are part of
the violence initiative. They were created under its umbrella before it
was cancelled. They confirm our fears that while the public aspects of
the violence initiative were withdrawn, the actual individual projects
continue unabated.
NIMH has a long history of supporting what we call Hi Tech Child Abuse.
Between 1989 and 1994, NIMH was funding experiments with fenfluramine.
In a comparison study with Ritalin, principal researcher Michael Aman was
giving children doses up to 1.6 mg kg of fenfluramine per day. The children,
age 5-13, were mentally retarded — another group notoriously vulnerable
to medical experimentation.
Yet it was already known by 1989 that fenfluramine has no positive effect
on the behavior of children, even by NIMH standards. This was confirmed
in a study conducted during the early 1980s and published in 1989 by NIMH's
Child Psychiatry Branch (Maureen Donnelly, Judith Rapoport, et al., "Fenfluramine
and Dextroamphetamine Treatment of Childhood Hyperactivity," Archives
of General Psychiatry, 46:205-212, 1989).
It is time for Americans to demand that psychiatric researchers stop
using children as human guinea pigs.
