What Next Big Pharma?
To the editor:
What next Big Pharma? How about NPIPD (Nose-Picking In Public Disorder), or how about NBSD (Nail-Biting and Swallowing Disorder)? Can you design a pill for these so-called ‘disorders’?
The week my son started kindergarten he was diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). Prior to school, there seemed to be nothing wrong with him, either at home or in day care (I’m still scratching my head).
I have proven that everyone who has ever asked me – “How do you make maps?” (I’m a cartographer by profession) has ADD (Attention Deficit ‘Disorder’) when I inform them of the technical protocol. I lose them after the forth or fifth sentence when I talk about surveyors having to go out to the area being mapped and establish vertical and horizontal control points for each model on the aerial photographs (are you getting ADD already too?).
When a five-year-old child, who is used to swinging on the monkey bars or buzzing the neighborhood on her or his bike, is suddenly chained to a desk for six hours a day, having some boring adult drone on and on about something a child doesn’t give two “turds” about, of course, said child will lose attention and become hyperactive (just try putting on a straightjacket).
“I just want to go out and play, dad,” one of my sons told me when I asked him if he liked school. “I don’t care if one plus one equals two or eleven. I can learn stuff like that when I’m older if I need to.” Indeed, kids do say the darnedest things.
In Germany they have what is called ‘Kinderwald’ where children learn about our world out in nature. Why don’t we give that a try or are we trying to hammer nature out of them?
So what did they do to my son? They put him on Ritalin. Ritalin is a brand name for methylphenidate, aka SPEED. He’s hyperactive at school so let’s pump him up some more, duh! This is a highly addictive drug; it crushes one’s appetite among other side effects and, according to Dr. Samuel Epstein in his book, “Cancergate,” causes cancer in laboratory animals. When I put this to the boy’s mother, she brushed me off as a paranoid conspiracy theorist. Think of what it does to a child’s self-esteem: to be told he’s ‘sick’ and must take a pill everyday to ‘cure’ him?
Big Pharma has a plan waiting for approval called the “New ‘Freedom’ Initiative/Commission.” They want to psychologically test every child in school to see if they have any ‘disorders’. The guidelines for whether or not a child needs to be put on medication are set by the drug companies. They brag that currently 15 percent of our kids are on dope but, by the end of the program, they will have 50 percent of our little nippers on some kind of psychotropic drug – plus $6 billion more a year in profits. Diabolical!
I have an idea for Big Pharma that could make the world a much better place for our children to inherit. Why don’t they get their hired shrinks to consider designing a pill to treat what I call AOCD (Avarice Or Cupidity Disorder)? People, like Donald Trump or Gordon Gecko (of the Hollywood film Wall Street fame; “Greed is good!”) who have this ‘disorder’ could be cured; Big Pharma could have their Big Profits (for it seems this country has more than its share of AOCD patients); and they could leave our children’s minds alone to reach their full potential and be the creative and imaginative wonders they were the day they were born.
Frank Gubasta
S. Fort Myers