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[Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
Anne wrote: There was just a big article about Ritalin circulating the internet and how it affects the brain's chemistry exactly the same as Cocaine. Let me know if you'd like me to email it to you. You know - if you'd like dear - I will be willing to tell anybody you wish that I was hooked on Ritalin once - as were LOTS of other adults in California. It was our drug of choice and it is most definitly SPEED - SPEED SPEED SPEED SPEED SPEED - it keeps you awake - it arouses you sexually - you grit your teeth and can't eat food - it speeds you up and you become compulsive about things - that is, hung up - that's what the druggies used to call it - hung up - meaning, so involved in whatever you're compelled to do that you're driven to such distraction that you can't even stop what you're doing long enough to walk across the room and turn off the damned water. In every speed freak crash pad (where Speed addicts congregate in nasty old apartments or deserted houses or the like) there was always one thing you could count on. Always - the water would be constantly running - there would be a black path worn out of the porcaline in every sink or bath tub. I even wrote a story about it for my book. .................. [Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
I'll tell you what I think. These wretched "counselors" - these ninety day wonders from Archie Comic Books USA - actually start to believe that they're qualified to take authority over other people's lives. Counselors are brain police. They are the feelers for the government. They themselves might not realize it - but I do. The are the finger that the government keeps on the pulse of its people. After all - whenever there's a catastrophy of any kind - a rape - domestic violence - a shooting in a high school like Columbine - a tragedy like the World Trade Center - who do they send practically at the same time as the firemen and the police? Of course. THE COUNSELORS. They come to counsel the victims and they write it all down and they submit it - to the machine that governs us all. The government. We are fast approaching the reality of 1984 (the book by George Orwell) which has been happning all along, but we just didn't believe it. Anne [Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
See this from author Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe on science, 28 Oct 1999
Wolfe says:
Anyone with a child in school knows the signs all
too well. I have children in school, and I am
intrigued by the faith parents now invest--the
craze began about 1990--in psychologists who
diagnose their children as suffering from a defect
known as attention deficit disorder, or ADD. Of
course, I have no way of knowing whether this
"disorder" is an actual, physical, neurological
condition or not, but neither does anybody else in
this early stage of neuroscience. The symptoms of
this supposed malady are always the same. The
child, or, rather, the boy--forty-nine out of fifty
cases are boys--fidgets around in school, slides
off his chair, doesn't pay attention, distracts his
classmates during class, and performs poorly. In
an earlier era he would have been pressured to
pay attention, work harder, show some
self-discipline. To parents caught up in the new
intellectual climate of the 1990s, that approach
seems cruel, because my little boy's problem is...
he's wired wrong! The poor little tyke --the fix
has been in since birth! Invariably the parents
complain, "All he wants to do is sit in front of
the
television set and watch cartoons and play Sega
Genesis." For how long? "How long? For hours
at a time." Hours at a time; as even any young
neuroscientist will tell you, that boy may have a
problem, but it is not an attention deficit.
Nevertheless, all across America we have the
spectacle of an entire generation of little
boys, by
the tens of thousands, being dosed up on ADD's
magic bullet of choice, Ritalin, the CIBA-Geneva
Corporation's brand name for the stimulant
methylphenidate. I first encountered Ritalin in
1966 when I was in San Francisco doing
research for a book on the psychedelic or hippie
movement. A certain species of the genus hippie
was known as the Speed Freak, and a certain
strain of Speed Freak was known as the Ritalin
Head. The Ritalin Heads loved Ritalin. You'd see
them in the throes of absolute Ritalin
raptures...Not a wiggle, not a peep...They would
sit engrossed in anything at all...a manhole cover,
their own palm wrinkles...indefinitely...through
shoulda-been mealtime after mealtime...through
raging insomnias...Pure methyl-phenidate
nirvana...From 1990 to 1995, CIBA-Geneva's
sales of Ritalin rose 600 percent; and not because
of the appetites of subsets of the species Speed
Freak in San Francisco, either. It was because an
entire generation of American boys, from the best
private schools of the Northeast to the worst
sludge-trap public schools of Los Angeles and
San Diego, was now strung out on
methylphenidate, diligently doled out to them
every day by their connection, the school nurse.
America is a wonderful country! I mean it! No
honest writer would challenge that statement! The
human comedy never runs out of material! It
never lets you down!
Meantime, the notion of a self--a self who
exercises self-discipline, postpones gratification,
curbs the sexual appetite, stops short of
aggression and criminal behavior--a self who can
become more intelligent and lift itself to the very
peaks of life by its own bootstraps through study,
practice, perseverance, and refusal to give up in
the face of great odds--this old-fashioned notion
(what's a boot strap, for God's sake?) of success
through enterprise and true grit is already
slipping
away, slipping away...slipping away...The
peculiarly American faith in the power of the
individual to transform himself from a helpless
cypher into a giant among men, a faith that ran
from Emerson ("Self-Reliance") to Horatio
Alger's Luck and Pluck stories to Dale
Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence
People to Norman Vincent Peale's The Power
of Positive Thinking to Og Mandino's The
Greatest Salesman in the World --that faith is
now as moribund as the god for whom Nietzsche
wrote an obituary in 1882. It lives on today only
in the decrepit form of the "motivational talk," as
lecture agents refer to it, given by retired
football
stars such as Fran Tarkenton to audiences of
businessmen, most of them woulda-been athletes
(like the author of this article), about how
life is
like a football game. "It's late in the fourth
period
and you're down by thirteen points and the
Cowboys got you hemmed in on your own
one-yard line and it's third and twenty-three.
Whaddaya do?..."
Sorry, Fran, but it's third and twenty-three and
the genetic fix is in, and the new message is now
being pumped out into the popular press and onto
television at a stupefying rate. Who are the
pumps? They are a new breed who call
themselves "evolutionary psychologists." You can
be sure that twenty years ago the same people
would have been calling themselves Freudian; but
today they are genetic determinists, and the press
has a voracious appetite for whatever they come
up with.
The most popular study currently--it is still being
featured on television news shows, months
later--is David Lykken and Auke Tellegen's study
at the University of Minnesota of two thousand
twins that shows, according to these two
evolutionary psychologists, that an individual's
happiness is largely genetic. Some people are
hardwired to be happy and some are not.
Success (or failure) in matters of love, money,
reputation, or power is transient stuff; you soon
settle back down (or up) to the level of happiness
you were born with genetically. Three months ago
Fortune devoted a long takeout, elaborately
illustrated, of a study by evolutionary
psychologists at Britain's University of Saint
Andrews showing that you judge the facial beauty
or handsomeness of people you meet not by any
social standards of the age you live in but by
criteria hardwired in your brain from the moment
you were born. Or, to put it another way, beauty
is not in the eye of the beholder but embedded in
his genes. In fact, today, in the year 1996, barely
three years before the end of the millennium, if
your appetite for newspapers, magazines, and
television is big enough, you will quickly get the
impression that there is nothing in your life,
including the fat content of your body, that is not
genetically predetermined. If I may mention just a
few things the evolutionary psychologists have
illuminated for me over the past two months:
The male of the human species is genetically
hardwired to be polygamous, i.e., unfaithful to his
legal mate. Any magazine-reading male gets the
picture soon enough. (Three million years of
evolution made me do it!) Women lust after male
celebrities, because they are genetically hardwired
to sense that alpha males will take better care of
their offspring. (I'm just a lifeguard in the gene
pool, honey.) Teenage girls are genetically
hardwired to be promiscuous and are as helpless
to stop themselves as dogs in the park. (The
school provides the condoms.) Most murders are
the result of genetically hardwired compulsions.
(Convicts can read, too, and they report to the
prison psychiatrist: "Something came over
me...and then the knife went in." 2 )
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