Give your children Amphetamines to lose Weight !! Are we crazy or what ?

“Kids are different today,” I hear every mother say,
“Mother needs something today to calm her down.”
And ‘though she’s not really ill, there’s a little yellow pill
She goes running for the shelter of her mother’s little helper.
And it helps her on her way, gets her through her busy day.

– “Mother’s Little Helper,” The Rolling Stones, 1966

Give your children Amphetamines to lose Weight !!

Psychiatric doctors in Canada are now claiming that psychiatric drugs promote weight loss! Yep, the weight loss gimmick has now been invoked by the psychiatric industry, which is grasping for more ridiculous reasons to put more kids and teenagers on their dangerous prescription medications.

The twisted thinking goes like this: ADHD makes kids eat too much, causing obesity. ADHD is a brain chemistry imbalance, they explain. Therefore, doping kids with mind-altering psych drugs will cause them to lose weight. (I’m not making this up. This is an accurate re-statement of the position of the psych doctors.)

A clinical trial run by psych doctors showed that kids actually lose weight on the psych drugs. Well no wonder: They’re on speed! (ADHD drugs are, in reality, just brand-name amphetamine drugs.)

Methamphetamines make you lose weight, too, but that doesn’t mean we should run around putting kids on meth, does it?

Read the bizarre report yourself here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/h…

Since the 1950s, several generations of Americans have turned to medicine — with the expectation that new pills would help make them happy, less depressed, better workers, better lovers. This trend started in 1955, when Wallace Laboratories and Wyeth Laboratories began marketing an anti-anxiety drug known generically as meprobamate — and commercially as Miltown and Equanil.

At the time, Miltown was believed to reduce anxiety and stress without side effects (it was later determined that it could become addictive, as well as dangerous with other drugs). It was also believed to be a breakthrough from previous treatments — which involved sleep-inducing or potentially lethal sedatives and narcotics.

Within months, Miltown became part of American popular culture. Milton Berle, whose television program was watched by millions weekly, jokingly called himself “Miltown Berle.” Favorable articles on the drug ran in TIME, Look and other magazines. A year after Miltown’s release, 5 percent of the American population was taking tranquilizers.

Miltown’s success prompted the Swiss-based pharmaceutical group Hoffman-LaRoche to leap into the tranquilizer market. That company’s response to Miltown was from a different chemical family — the benzheptoxdiazines, substances used for dyeing products.

The result, chlordiazepoxide, went on the market in 1960 and was called Librium after the word “equalibrium.” A search for an improved version of Librium led Hoffman-LaRoche chemists to Diazepam — which was stronger and required smaller doses. It was marketed as Valium.

Until the appearance of Prozac in the 1980s, Valium was the largest-selling pharmaceutical drug in history. By the middle of the 1970s, more than 60 million Valium prescriptions were written each year. But Valium’s unhealthy side was also revealed at that time — it, too, turned out to be addictive. Several well-publicized cases of celebrities’ struggles with the drug brought Valium sales back closer to Earth by the start of the 1980s — when an anti-ulcer medicine took over as the most widely prescribed drug in America.

The 1980s also brought in a new generation of anti-depressants, the SSRIs — or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Those drugs, which include Prozac, remove depression’s chemical source by keeping serotonin — which is linked to mood — from being too quickly reabsorbed by brain neurons. They are also considered much safer than the earlier, tricyclic anti-depressants — which increase serotonin levels in the body.

The popularity of Prozac, as well as the increased use of the stimulant Ritalin to control attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children, has underscored America’s growing use of drugs to control depression, emotional problems and other unwanted behaviors. At a recent meeting of the Pediatric Academic Society, the results of a poll of 600 doctors were released. Nearly 75 percent of the doctors surveyed said they had prescribed an anti-depressant to patients under the age of 18.

From :

The Tranquilizing of America
How mood-altering prescription drugs changed the cultural landscape
By Bruce Kennedy
CNN